Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, especially with technology. Today’s generation doesn’t even have to learn to spell, as every way they choose to correspond, be it email, texting, or social networking, is spellchecked. The iPhone even has an auto-correct option on it, which automatically corrects your errors, but sometimes it fixes words that aren’t really errors, such as names or even real words. It can be a definite annoyance. IPhones come shipped with the option turned on and working. However, there is a way to shut off the spelling auto-correction automatically, and there is also an option to reset the dictionary. Every time you correct a word, it saves it to an internal dictionary.
How to reconfigure AutoCorrect to NOT drive you crazy 3 Comments How many times has this happened to you? Let’s get rid of that bad boy: Highlight it with your mouse and click Delete. Stuff you misspell so often you forget how the word’s actually spelled – and AutoCorrect will fix those as you type.
Yet sometimes that saves things that shouldn’t be saved. Somehow I had “a’s” saved in my phone. Every time I type “as,” it auto-corrects it to “a’s,” making me have to fix it. I needed to fix that, because “as” is typed so frequently.
If you just don’t want the iPhone to auto-correct your typing at all, you can completely shut that off. Click on “Settings,” then find “General” from that screen, click on that, followed by “Keyboard.” From the “Keyboard” screen you will see several options you can turn off, one of them being “Auto-Correction.” If you change the slider from ON to OFF, you will stop the phone from auto-correcting at all. It certainly doesn’t have to be permanent, and you may want to use it just for certain times, such as when you have a lot of names to type. Certain other corrections can be changed as well.
Not only can you stop the iPhone from autocorrecting, but you can stop it from even checking your spelling with “Check Spelling.” Turning off “Auto-Capitalization” will stop the iPhone from capitalizing the first word of every sentence as well as certain proper nouns. “.” Shortcut allows you to tap the spacebar twice and have the phone add a period and capitalize the next word. That can be shut off, as well as “Enable Caps Lock.” If you want to reset the dictionary to get rid of any words that were errantly saved to it, such as “a’s,” click on “Settings,” then “General.” Scroll down to the bottom and click on “Reset.” This again gives you a group of settings to reset.
Proceed with caution with any of these, especially “Reset All Settings” and “Erase All Content and Settings.” Clicking on “Reset Keyboard Dictionary” will remove any and all words added to the dictionary since you got the phone or since the last reset. Typing an email, text, or document after resetting the dictionary removes all the words that Auto-Correct has added. After resetting, it no longer changes “as” to “a’s,” but it does change words that need to be changed, such as changing “ill” to “I’ll.” It added the apostrophe as well as capitzalized the I. Of course “ill” is a word as well, but it’s typed much less often than “I’ll,” so I don’t mind that correction.
Decide how much correction you need, some or none, then choose the appropriate options. If you would just rather proceed on your own without any help, turn off the autocorrection altogether, but if it gets to the point where it’s just changing the wrong words, just reset the dictionary and start over.