I’ve mentioned my peculiar typing disorder before:
(Note that protects and pretends have the same initial schwa vowel phonetically, at least in my dialect.)
I make such errors frequently but just noticed a particularly egregious example.
Intending to type “instead” I actually typed “himself”. :eek: :smack:
Both vowels match up, as do the tones and the middle consonants (‘n’ and ‘m’ are both nasals.)
I suppose I suffer some brain damage, and I may have other minor symptoms. (There are, however, certain types of combinatorial puzzles I am still very good at solving.)
… These days I always click** Preview** before clicking Submit.
(And just noticed I had “does” instead of “days.” Almost all my substitutions are of words with same number of letters.)
I don’t think there’s a real name for it. It’s just a combination of being distracted and not having fully internalized the rules of grammar. Taking a college level grammar class helps somewhat, but only for the their/there type of issues.
The other ones like vowel/value happen when our mind wanders, and there’s no good way of fixing that. I have an English teaching degree and while I rarely mix up my its/it’s I do write or type things I hear and end up with sentences like “floppy discs store things through magic” instead of “magnetics” because someone nearby was talking about a magic show
Are you absolutely certain it’s your typing and not the friggin’ spell check? Once your spell-checker has been “taught” some dumb conversions, it’ll happily change “instead” to “himself”.
I don’t run any auto-correct or anything like that. Just vanilla Chrome. All these letters that keep appearing under Septimus’ name were punched out one-by-one with these ten hard-working (but very long!) fingers!
What often happens to me is, while I’m typing, my fingers will replace the word I’m thinking of with a similar word that I type frequently. If I spent 8 hours a day writing about linguistics and rarely wrote about ethics, I might type “vowels” instead of “values”.
…Taking a college level grammar class helps somewhat, but only for the their/there type of issues…/QUOTE]
Their/there and similar distinctions are surely things we learn well before college. Is there such a thing as a “college level grammar class”? (There’s linguistics of course, but that’s grammar at a much deeper level.)
In any event, I don’t get the impression that septimus doesn’t know the correct word. I make some of the same mistakes he mentions when tired or typing quickly.
I mostly find myself having forgotten to type certain words in. Rereading it later I am embarrassed over how stupid it therefore reads. Worst of course is that even previewing usually does not help as my mind fills in what I am expecting to see which of course is what I was thinking and meant to type.
Yeah. I use too many little words already, but leaving some out at random isn’t the way to better writing.
I have noticed that often when I go back to edit a post to insert some forgotten word, if I preview my edit the added word will be one word to the left of where I intended it to be. Never to the right.
Which make me wonder if there’s an issue with the script that runs this input box. Or am I just a really crappy typist?
