There are really a lot of great things we can do with technology. We are certainly communicating faster with each other and producing documents that have a lot more flash to them. But, with that said, it is important that we remember, our brains are the things doing the critical thinking. The computer technology available to us is simply a tool we can use.
I honestly see far too many people relying heavily on technology to do tasks that could be better done on paper first. Even in the school systems, we are seeing teachers promoting the idea of taking notes on a computer instead of taking notes by hand. Unfortunately, the research out there says we retain the material better by not going straight to the computers.
As writers, we also have to remember that computer technology has it's limits. Take for example our spell checkers and grammar checkers. We have all had the experience of that auto-correct function making changes we don't want. But there is also the issue of typos that are spelled correctly.
When it comes to your grammar checker, unless you have personally adjusted the settings, your grammar checker is only casually looking for less than a third of the problems.
What is the result of that? Those "typos" and those "small errors" may be leading you down the path to a rejection letter. Editors and agents can be pretty forgiving, but we have to draw a line when the mistakes get to be too annoying.
Just something to think about.
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