I’m a gluten for punishment. Autocorrect is a Beast!

Have you ever written a message on your favorite social media site only to have autocorrect kick in? You might have carefully selected the perfect word, but autocorrect thinks it knows better, changing that word out for something that is completely wrong. But it's not just on social media that autocorrect misbehaves. Sometimes, it decides to have a field day within MS Word and other word-processing programs too.

BUT, how many times have you actually just misspelled something but blamed autocorrect? Be honest. You know you've done it at least once or twice.

Today, I thought I'd pay homage to some of the masterpiece moments of autocorrect and just plain bad spelling.

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Aspiring Writer: The Sequel

In a post last year, I spoke about the term aspiring writer and how it's a term that I dislike. Back then, I had this wonderful circular argument about how if you write, then you are a writer — no aspiring about it. Regardless, I still see an insane number of people who insist on calling themselves aspiring writers.

Back when that original post first came out, someone had commented on one of my Facebook discussion groups that the term writer referred to a person who was paid to write.

To be fair, the term applies to people who want to make a career out of writing. Writer is a professional term.

You have no idea how much my skin crawls at this concept. Clearly, my arguments using the definitions in Merrian-Webster were insufficient to get my point across. Perhaps the Oxford English Dictionary might sway the ideas. So here goes.

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Books could almost be immortal

I have seen many debates over that last few years about whether the introduction of the eBook has killed the publishing industry. Many have asked whether books are a thing of the past. It's a valid question, but this is not the first time the question has been asked.

Think about all the old doomsday stories. In many of them, society has been left to flounder, and the knowledge of the past is frequently lost. Reading becomes a lost skill or something that only a select few know. Languages evolve and unless certain knowledge is passed down from generation to generation, history becomes this mysterious thing that none of us understand.

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There is no such thing as an aspiring writer…

There is a term that I have seen bandied around in the bios of various writers, and it's a term that I don't like: aspiring writer.

What I don't understand is how one can aspire to be a writer. You can aspire to be an author. You can aspire to quit your day job to become a full-time writer. You can aspire to share your writing with the world. But aspire to be a writer?

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Can’t is an evil word… It shouldn’t exist.

The word can't is a word that needs to disappear from people's vocabulary. It's an evil word, on so many levels.

But for me, the word can't is a challenge that my brain subconsciously accepts, for good or bad. If I hear the word can't, my brain goes, "Watch me!"

Most of the time, it's a good thing, because it's not about focusing on limits, but accepting that the solution on how to do something will be made up of strategies that might be a bit oddball. But everything can be done, even if we don't know how. However, there have been times when I heard that horrible little word, and I got myself into big trouble.

"You can't get lost." And it wasn't just a 2-hours drive in the wrong direction. I totaled the boss's car.

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