May 21, 20212 min read

Shoutout To the Red Squiggly Lines

You know how when you're typing, and you misspell or mistype something, the computer/device underlines it with a red squiggle?

And then it gives you a suggestion to correct it?

That feature is the single reason why anything I type is readable.

And it’s not that I’m a bad speller.

It’s that I’m a bad typer.

Well, really, if we dig deeper here, I’m not totally tragic at typing.

But I mistype EVERYTHING.

All. The. Time.

Why is that??

After much reflection on this annoying conundrum, I am ready to make a hypothesis.

I believe my problem is two-fold:

1. My brain goes faster than my fingers.

I literally trip over the keyboard as I go, trying to keep up with my thoughts. I feel like if I don’t get it down on the page the thought will slip away and be lost forever. Therefore I miss keys, I hit the space bar too soon, and I capitalize the first two letters of a word instead of just the first letter.

*Eye roll*

2. I believe keyboards were not made with human hands in mind.

Everything on the keyboard is straight across and evenly spaced. Yet our fingers are not the same length or width on a single hand, much less across all humans. And certain letter combinations have one hand all bunched up trying to hit keys and then stretching out to try to hit that shift key or that random number or symbol we need.

Ugh.

I don’t know about you, but these issues cause me pain and frustration daily.

Hourly.

Minute-ly.

And I end up punching that Delete/Backspace key like it personally offended me.