Friday, April 11, 2008

The oderr of teh ltetres dsone't mteatr

Have you seen the "study" which claims that your brain is such an amazing thing that it is able to decode words and sentences even if the letters are in the wrong order? Supposedly, all that matters is that the first and last letter are in the right spot.

This is good news for me, because as I've been reading my past posts today, I discovered that I am a terrible proofreader. My posts are littered with errors. Mostly little ones, I see. No comma here, no apostrophe there. It appears my favorite error is to replace one tiny word with a different tiny word. Swap "and" for "the." Type "of" instead of "in." I also like to leave letters off the ends of words, especially "d," "s," and "r."

My defense is two-part. First: I don't really proofread at all. I just read for content once and then spell-check and then post. Second: I have my computer screen at work positioned at an odd angle so people at the door can't see what I'm working on. It's actually a little hard for me to see as well. Also, I have a big desk and a relatively small monitor so I'd really have to lean in to proofread and then, well, it would be pretty obvious that I'm not working. My job doesn't require leaning on a regular basis.

When I post I also try to make my writing approximate how I actually talk, so that explains the run-on sentences and certain other quirks and oddities.

I came across this a while ago and I absolutely agree with her. When I looked it up to link it to this post, it cross-referenced with another post called "Writing without typos is totally outdated."

I'm totally down with that.

3 comments:

Shauna said...

"Perfectionists are hypercritical to the point that they can’t support people around them."

Speaking of hypercritical... Did you SEE how MEAN she was to all the poor, innocent perfectionists? *So offended*

Anonymous said...

When her article de-crying perfectionism appeared on Yahoo it was met with a vicious yalp from all the perfectionists out there.

"Well, I'm a HEART SURGEON and I'm sorry, but 'close enough' just isn't good enough in my profession."

They totally missed the point. It's worthless to try to be perfect about everything. Just pick the things that matter. If you're being a perfectionist about something just to make yourself *feel* good, then it's probably not a worthy cause. Plus if you're making yourself *feel* good by being a perfectionist, you're probably making others feel like crap in the process.

Shauna said...

I'm sorry that my perfection makes you feel like crap. I love you anyway.