Spelling?...Whatever! 2

[spayne]

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thgouht slpeling was ipmorantt!

Someone emailed me this today. I thought I'd share it with you all.

 

[mscallisto]

I heard it this way:

When you raed a sencente, the oerdr of the ltetres in a word dsnoe’t mteatr as long as the fsirt and lsat ones are in the rhgit pcale.

Last fall, a widely circulated e-mail written in a similarly garbled fashion reached Denis Pelli, a professor of psychology at New York University. He set to work figuring out why this trick works.

When a reader focuses on a word, Pelli says, the eyes take in both central and peripheral views. The eye’s periphery can’t focus as narrowly, making it difficult to identify the letters in the middle of a word, so the brain recognizes the word as a unit based on the first and last letters, as well as key features such as dangling g’s and tall d’s.

If the intervening letters are scrambled, the reader can still identify the word fairly quickly. Faster readers do this using sentence context. Pelli finds that when the whole sentence is scrambled to remove contextual information, slow and fast readers comprehend individual words, scrambled or not, at nearly the same rate.

 

[CajunCenturion]

Spelling is important, but not necessarily for the reason of communicating a certain message.

Spelling is a reflection of the professionalism of the writer. How much would you invest in a proposal that contains numerous spelling errors? I believe that it can be an indication of one's attention to detail.

Good Luck
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[mscallisto]

The resume with spelling errors is usually the first one I discard. (I wish this forum had spell check)!



"The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and
dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."
- Galileo Galilei

 

[spayne]

I agree with you Cajun. I named this thread with tongue firmly in cheek. Poor spelling is a huge pet peeve of mine and one cannot downplay its importance in effective communication.

I just thought it was very bizarre that sentences are that readable when everything's jumbled up. Especially when I occasionaly find myself tripping over one misspelled word.

 

[ESquared]

Spayne,

Do you mean, "one cannot overplay its importance" or perhaps "one should not downplay its importance?" I am just asking a question about usage... I could be wrong.

I'm with you, though... misspellings leap out at me. For example, it's a common occurrence for me when I look at a restaurant menu for misspelled words very far from the focus of my eyes to sort of pull my attention to them. It's strange. I notice misspellings everywhere I go without making any effort whatsoever. It's both cool and annoying.

In the case of the intentionally scrambled words, though, I can read them just fine, with only the occasional hiccup for some word or other. (The worst was oredr.)

In elementary school, when I was unsure how to spell a word, I just wrote it every possible way, and this sense just "told me" which one was right because all the others looked wrong.

P.S. I can and do misspell words... especially if I don't proofread. But that's more carelessness than not knowing how to spell something. I do have to look up words sometimes, though.

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It is better to have honor than a good reputation.
(Reputation is what other people think about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.)

 

[coakerb]

If you want a Spell check for this or another post and are using IE, download IE Spell and it integrates on the tool bar...get it here:

http://www.iespell.com/

 

[mscallisto]

Didn't know that coakerb I'll give it a try...thanks very much!

 

[GlenJohnson]

testing....\hey, this is nice...thanks coakerb for the spell check.

Glen A. Johnson
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