Uselessness of Proper Spelling
Given how unimportant spelling is for understanding, why do some of you take such great pleasure in correcting me.
This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text.
This is easy to denmtrasote. In a puiltacibon of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon. Saberi’s work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work.
The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang.
This was not easy to type!
March 31st, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Seeing as you fancy yourself a writer, we see no problem in pointing out instances where you look like a bad one. Consider it constructive criticism.
March 31st, 2008 at 2:25 pm
On the whole people prefer words to be spelled correctly.
March 31st, 2008 at 4:13 pm
lol