Wniitrg ploerpry?

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Acrocindg to rteusls of an Elgsnih Uveintrisy, it dneso't mteatr in waht oderr the lteetrs of a wrod are pceald, the olny tnhig of ipmnrtaoce is taht the fsirt and the lsat ltteer are on tiher crecort pclae. The rset of the ltertes can be pclaed at yuor own lkniig, and adrawfters you can eailsy raed the wteitrn text. Tihs is psilbose bucesae we dno't read eervy ltteer aaprt, but erevy wrod as a wlohe.

Just to be sure:
According to results of an English University, it doesnt matter in what order the letters of a word are placed, the only thing of importance is that the first and the last letter are on their correct place. The rest of the letters can be placed at your own liking, and afterwards you can easily read the written text. This is possible because we don't read every letter apart, but every word as a whole.

 

Maybe this is a sign that far too many people in society are really horrible spellers, and we've all gotten used to dealing with them?

 

Old nwes, man.

@ Rally - this has nothing to do with spelling, but with the way that the brain processes language while reading.

(To be as brief as possible) The brain is putting together words and meanings much faster than our eyes could ever take them in. Just one of the cool things about how language processing works.

 

I forgot the , Falstaff! You have to realize that my husband is a DREADFUL speller, whereas I regularly pick out spelling and grammar errors in long pages of text after a quick skim. It's something that I'm terribly anal about.

This is an extension of the principle behind speed-reading, isn't it? Maybe it's time I go finish the book I started back when my son was born, How Babies Talk. Fascinating stuff.

 

Lord receive the soul of this sinner right after I cut it out of his guts with a spoon...

@Rally: I know the feeling. Girls spell so badly It actually cures me of any crush when we start writing. I thought I would fall in love with the last one girl when I received a mail from her and there was not even a single error in there, not even a misplaced comma. And she wasn't even a native speaker But the previous one was making me sick

[ September 19, 2003, 20:56: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

as long as I don't have to read like that in my French classes I should be okay.

And Chev, not all girls spell badly, I know a lot of boys that spell badly. in fact the girls school overall has better spelling and writing than the boys school here.

I suppose I ruin the handwriting aspect though

 

@8people: I, too, know more males than females who are poor spellers.

 

You know, it is kind of funny. Just today I received the exact same message twice... in italian. And the study had supposedly been performed in an italian University. Maybe some international collaboration ?

I will never take this study as a valid excuse for misspelling though.

 

Funny indeed. I don't ven have English as my mouther tongue, but it was a piece o' cake to read it

 

Woah.

 

The same ability of the brain allows the pixels of a 360kb *.bmp file to be rearranged (facilitating better compression) and reproduced as a 36kb *.jpg file with an acceptable drop in quality.

The way that the text appears is how I would imagine normal text appears to a dyslexic person.

@Daephon, it's 'mother tongue', although, as this topic suggests, the brain automatically substitutes the right spelling. This ability makes it very hard to spot your own spelling mistakes and much easier to spot those of oethrs.

Leet spelling (hiss, boo, don't use it) also works on the same principle. As the brain has to compensate for seemingly mispelt words it has to work harder, making leet text slower to read, except by people who use it constantly.

Dislexics of the world untie

 

@ Bluin: I believe there is a subtle but important difference between the "constant misspelling" we talk here and the lame "leet spelling": in misspelling you switch place to symbols which are normally found in words (hopefully, in the word you meant to write). Leet spelling however, afaik, uses symbols which are normally not used to compose words (numbers, punctuation), based on a supposedly graphical similarity with the substituted letter.
While in both cases the effect is to slow down the reading rate, the area of the brain that does the "translation" is probably a different one: in the first case the brain needs to "rearrange" elements that are present already, whereas in the second one the brain still needs to figure out those elements.

*end the scientific ranting*

 

The best thing about this study is that it "explains" to people why Chinese and Egyptian heiroglyphics work. The brain reads the whole word, not each individual letter, or with Chinese, stroke.

Cool.

 

And what is why even an excessive load of typos is but a meagre offence... unless someone clearly has the time to check it or is otherwise expected to write correctly without resorting to external measures At this same time, for leet we cherish a sincere hatred in our hearts as it's plain abuse of our precious time and downright disrespect.

 

I presume you are not dyslectic (I think this is the correct way to spell it). First of all, being dyslectic really sucks and I don't exactly know how it works, but there is probably something really messed up in the brain. I can only speak out of my personal exprecience as a dyslectic person, but their are multiple forms of dyslexia. I have light case of dyslexia, others in my family (dyslexia is genetic) have bigger problem with reading and writing.

It took me a while to understand what MoN's message was (I didn't notice he also wrote it in normal spelling at first). I think this has something to do with not being able to recognise the words, when they are misspelled. When the text is written with normal spelling, I have no problem reading it most of the time, and the letters certainly don't appear scrambled.

Being dyslectic doesn't only give problems with reading. Off course sometimes, when I read a sentence, I read something completely different than what the sentence actually says. My biggest problem is with writing. When I write a piece of text (or a message at this board) it is filled with mistakes. With mistakes, I don't mean the typos everybody makes, but actually leaving words out of a sentence, writting a completely different word than I intended to write, or even start one sentence and finishing with another. When I post a message, I need to read it at least a few times to correct all the errors, before I post it. Even after I post it, I need to edit it a few times to correct all the errors I didn't see before. This is really time consuming with longer messages.

I think my spelling has improved at these boards, for I now pay much more attention to writing correctly and to find all my mistakes. I recently was reading some messages I made a longer time ago, and sometimes even I didn't know what I meant exactly by a certain sentence.

 

I think dyslexia is something about how your eyes see the words on a page, I saw something on TV where they tried out special glasses on children with dyslexia and their reading was better when they wore them, however... the glasses looked pretty stupid.

I've always spelt it Dyslexia, but that might just be british spelling of it.

 

I'm no expert on the matter, so I can only tell you what I've heard about it and my personal experiences. There may be some sort of aid for certain dyslectic people, but I'm pretty sure it is a mental condition. With dyslexia there is a malfunction in the way the words or text is interpretated by the brain. It isn't an eye malfunction. It is said that dyslectic people have a whole different pattern of thinking.

When somebody says 'tree', what is the first thing you think about? Somebody told me once, that people with dyslexia think more in images. When I hear 'tree', I immediatly think of a tall tree, with green leaves, I can almost actually see it. That is probably the first thing that comes up in the mind of every dyslectic person. People without dyslexia, sooner think about 't-r-e-e'.

Dyslexia has two major forms, 'stupid' dyslexia, and 'smart' dyslexia. People with 'stupid' dyslexia have an obvious mental problem and have a low intelligence which causes their dyslexia. People with 'smart' dyslexia are often very intelligent people. They have a less developed part of the brain, and a better developed part of the brain. If I remember correctly, Einstein was a dyslectic. 'Smart' dyslectics can easily get a very high eduction, and they are often better in another form of mental skills.

 

I am no expert neither on the subject, but we touched dyslexia in a neurobiology class many years ago. It is a brain dysfunction, genetically inherited. The problem is in the "coding" step of the reading/writing process, i.e. between reading letters and activating the symbol in your brain or, as Mesmero pointed out, the other way around, namely between activating the symbols in your brain and translating them into letters on a piece of paper/keyboard. Damn, I wish I could remember more (so much for amnesia). Maybe I should get back to the text book.

Anyway, I have to compliment you Mesmero, your posts are top quality !

 

@Mesmero. Your English is better that that of many English natives.

Dyslexic and dyslectic are synonyms.

I have a relative with dyslexia and I also went to college with a guy who had it. Both of these people were very intellegent. The fact that such a common condition goes undiagnosed in many children during their early education is often attributed to their high intelligence, which allows them to compensate for the impairment, (lets not to mention the speed at which many teachers reach the (wrong) conclusion that they are just plain lazy. Oops).

Computer based dictation and narration programs are being promoted as a great aid to people with dyslexia. I don't have it, but I still use the free narrator from Help Read to read eBooks aloud, just for pleasure. It's much better than the one that comes with XP.

My relative with dyslexia (and a Degree) also has trouble with holding sequences of things to be done in his short term memory. He gets around this by continuously creating written 'To Do' lists.

Anyway, I noticed that I could not easily figure out the misspelt words above in sentences where the grammer was poor. It was also hard to work out words if they are out of context, eg. adrawfters. So in closing M'Lord, I will suggest that grammar and natural sentence flow have also got a part to play in decyphering the words.

This is why the WWII Enigma cypher machine generated five groups of five characters per line (if I remember correctly). Itdis guise dhewo rdsbe ingtr ansmi tted.

 

I actually often try to hide my dyslexia. My English is actually pretty good, it is my writing which is bad. It doesn't matter which language I write in, even if I write in Dutch, I sill have problems with it. I just try to spend as much attention to writing correctly as possible, which takes more effort at some times, than at other times.

My dyslexia wasn't discovered until I was fourteen or fifteen years old. Teachers often don't know what dyslexia is exactly and can't diagnose children with it. It was my mother (who has a worse case of dyslexia than me), who said that I should get tested.

Anyway, I recognise the 'To do' lists. If I think of something, I immediatly write it down, because if I don't, there is a big chance I can't remember it an hour later.

But enough about me and my problems. You can perfectly live with dyslexia, you just need to know how to get around it.