Next time a pedant criticises your spelling ...

[meenaghman]

tell them you're only exercising the brain.

Icdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg.The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch atCmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in what oerdr the ltteres in aword are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is that the frsit and last ltteer bein the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raedit whotuit a pboerlm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raedervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? Yaeh andI awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

 

[Noodley]

very good, er I mean vrey good

 

[Shaun]

So why doesn't this amazing power work when you're watching Countdown or trying to solve an anagram at the local pub quiz? ...

I've seen this before, but it is amazing how you can read it without any concious thought to how it's actually written.

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[tyred]

I wn'ot get cirtesicd as terhe is nithong worng whit my silpelng.

 

[Ravenbait]

Speak for yourself.

I really struggle with that, always have.

Sam

 

[Bman]

 

[taxing]

I've seen that thing a few times and it annoys me. Yes, I can read it, but the last line, 'I always thought spelling was important' sets my teeth on edge. It is important! I was in a class with other PhD students recently and the tutor said that email is informal so you can get away with a couple of spelling mistakes. Not with me you can't. If I spot a spelling mistake in an email I will take from that that you couldn't be arsed to proofread it before you sent it, so I won't be arsed about whatever it is you're writing to me about.

 

[marinyork]

I've seen that thing a few times and it annoys me. Yes, I can read it, but the last line, 'I always thought spelling was important' sets my teeth on edge. It is important! I was in a class with other PhD students recently and the tutor said that email is informal so you can get away with a couple of spelling mistakes. Not with me you can't. If I spot a spelling mistake in an email I will take from that that you couldn't be arsed to proofread it before you sent it, so I won't be arsed about whatever it is you're writing to me about.

Don't worry, if the contents of your post on the Engineers banned from Philosophy conference thread were anything to go on, you'd be banned from Philosophy and Maths conferences . You seem to attach great importance to words without actually thinking about what they mean. The sort of pedantry you espouse leads to an intellectual dead end.

 

[taxing]

Don't worry, if the contents of your post on the Engineers banned from Philosophy conference thread were anything to go on, you'd be banned from Philosophy and Maths conferences . You seem to attach great importance to words without actually thinking about what they mean. The sort of pedantry you espouse leads to an intellectual dead end.

Sounds about right, I'm an English student.

 

[Maz]

I struggled to understand "raedervey" first time in that text, but I've got it now.

 

[Dan B]

Don't worry, if the contents of your post on the Engineers banned from Philosophy conference thread were anything to go on, you'd be banned from Philosophy and Maths conferences . You seem to attach great importance to words without actually thinking about what they mean. The sort of pedantry you espouse leads to an intellectual dead end.

Sounds about right, I'm an English student.

Post Of The Week

 

[Black Sheep]

i think part of the op requires the words to be read in context as well, if you had a string of five words written like that, that did not make a sentence then I don't think it would work.

 

[Coco]

http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp

 

[byegad]

I taught myself to speed read while at college. We had a huge reading list and I thought it would help me to get through it all. I got hold of a book which showed you how to do it. In a few weeks I had it off pat.

It was time well spent in that I could speed read a complex 250 page text book in under 2 hours. While you don't retain everything at that speed you do retain a lot and you can always read it a couple more times! It is much harder work than slow reading.

It works in the same way as any competent reader works, but in larger chunks. So a normal reader will scan two or three words at a time and a speed reader a line or two or even three at a time. One thing that does happen is that you don't spot poor spelling as you don't really look that hard at a individual words.

Later on I knew an English teacher who always told poor spellers to read more. I used to laugh as I was reading 5 or 6 books a week and my spelling was always ropey and needed careful checking in order to be right.

I still read quickly and drive my wife mad if I'm using Ceefax, I read a page and scroll before she has got past the second line.

The point of all this??

Well the fact that you can read the badly spelled/jumbled word text is due to your reading technique, which is scan the shape of a group of words, pick out key letters and move on. I have a theory that the slower, or at least more carefully, you read the more likely you are to spot a mistake.