When I proofread something I’ve typed, I notice that I often repeat certain words. E.g. “The cat was sitting on the the garden wall” or “I was traveling through Europe on on a train”. I never do this while writing with a pen, only typing.
It is usually with articles or short prepositions & I often don’t even catch it while proofreading. I’ve noticed other dopers do that here too & I’m wondering why we do this and does this type of error have a name?
I don’t know if it has a name, but I do it also. It’s as if I am blind to certain typographic errors. For example, I can’t tell you how many times I typed ‘you’ when I meant to type ‘your’, proofread it and didn’t catch it.
One trick I onced learned is to proofread something by reading the words backwards, from the end to the beginning. That does seem to work for me, but I sometimes forget to do it. :smack:
I remember an illusion from elementary school that demonstrated the difficulty we have in seeing double word errors. This article discusses the issue, and includes a reference to the illusion I remember.
Yes, I recall that illusion from years ago. In my case it was I love Paris in the Springtime with the duplicated and printed on different lines. I fell for it at first and was suitably impressed, trying it out on other kids who hadn’t seen it. Nobody caught the duplication on the first reading. It really is a neat illusion.
That is interesting and I didn’t learn this in elementary school. It explains why I don’t catch this when proofreading, by why I do this in the the first place remains a a mystery!
I think a lot of those are spell check artifacts or are editing errors.
I often keystroke something like “on the ot her hand” and along the way spellcheck silently converts it to “on the the her hand”. Then I look at it and see the “ot” is missing from the “her”, so I go back and put the “ot” in. Never noticing the second “the” that spellcheck helpfully created out of a fragment of the “other” I did type, albeit with a space in it.
The other common scenario is almost any sentence editing where you’re moving clauses around or changing word order. It’s real easy to leave an extra preposition in there. Or get them out of sequence.
Bottom line: turn off all automated “help” and see if the problem still occurs to the same degree. I’ll bet you 50 quatloos it doesn’t.
The version I remember was simply
PARIS
IN THE
THE SPRING
I wonder if there were really two such similar versions or if one of us is miremembering.
A somewhat similar trick is to ask someone to count the number of "F"s in the sentence “Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years.”
One of the "F"s often gets overlooked for reasons slightly similar to why the doubled word gets overlooked.
A google image search for Paris in the the spring shows that indeed both versions exist.
Yeah, I just discovered that my cell phone has a similar tech disease. It’s not quite and auto-complete thing, it’s worse. I hand type a word in CORRECTLY, and when I hit the space “key,” the word I just finished entering is changed to something else. I have to backspace and change it back again three times before it stays as I wrote.
I don’t think you need a name for this. Unless you want to use a word that means “badly written ap software.”
When I see that happening that means two things have happened together. 1) The correct word isn’t in the spellcheck dictionary. And 2) the last time you typed this, you let autocorrect change it to it’s preferred choice without you noticing or correcting the correction. So you reinforced the bad correction instead.
The other thing many phone spellchecks do is make it very easy for you to inadvertently save a typo as a word in your custom dictionary. So the next time you type a similar legit word it doesn’t know, it helpfully silently changes it to some typo you made 2 months ago.
If you watch carefully enough to catch it as it substitutes a typo for a good word, there is a way to provoke a dialog box to say “Delete this learned word ‘fukc’ from your personal dictionary?” It may not be obvious how to trigger the dialog, but there is a way.
I’ve spent some time on typo-in-dictionary hygiene and it really really helps make spellcheck a net benefit, not a net distraction.
The browser spellcheck I use here has the same shortcomings. I get rockin’ and rollin’ on a post and the next thing I know I’ve saved 5 typos as legit words.
21st Century First World problems. Gaah! Sometimes I miss the old school problems like paper cuts and running out of postage stamps. 
Notice that the repeated “a” is quite glaringly obvious, but not the repeated “the”. The cognitive processes involved in reading are pretty complex, but in general there’s a heavy degree of pattern recognition whereby we generally read much faster than we can directly process individual words and characters. This pattern-oriented top-down processing based on the expectations of recognized word patterns tends to dominate in most cases over lower-level symbol processing.
The double “a” would probably not be noticed, however, if the second one was on a new line so that the unexpected pattern of two single letters wasn’t evident. We probably make these mistakes for the same reason that we tend to overlook them in the first place, and I suspect that many of the repeated words occur over line breaks in the original format of the text we’re typing, which is often not the same as the final format. They might also creep in when we cut and paste and move things around, where, again, our propensity to not notice them lets them hide in plain sight.
I do the opposite - I leave out thes and as etc. I also re-read, which doesn’t always catch them. And worse, I often type transpose then and than. Gives me the Tom Tits.
I think the ‘by’ I’ve emphasized in your message was intended to be ‘but’ — a completely unrelated word! Does that type of error have a name?
I make that error constantly, except that instead of replacing one short word with another short word, I often replace a longish word with a completely different longish word, totally nonsensical in context but with a few sounds similar to the correct word. Many of my posts would be complete gibberish if I didn’t proofread them!
I don’t think I make this type of error in handwriting — but I’m not 100% certain of that because (a) I hardly ever hand-write these days, (b) when I do, the result is illegible even to me!
I’ve found one way of typing that avoids these and other errors: While typing I stare at the keyboard and carefully watch where my fingers go!
HA! I even proof read that post and missed the by instead of but, Hopeless!!!
It took me several minutes to figure out what double word you were talking about I read it several times and finaly someone illustrated it on a post. Duhhhh!
To further demonstrate how complicated English is, sometimes a doubled word is legitimate and grammatically acceptable.
“Your problem is is that you have a problem with doubled words.”
That’s a somewhat common colloquial structure. Some uses hang a comma between the "is"es, but that’s kind of disputed. In some uses, that comma actually feels worse.
“He had had a good time, but now it was time to go.”
You can rephrase to eliminate the doubled words, but not everyone does. And it’s not objectively wrong to leave them. Just somewhat awkward.
Awkwardness, thy name is English.
When I do this (on my computer, which has no autocorrect), it usually means my train of thought was interrupted. It happens more often when the next word I want to type is somewhat similar, like starting with the same letter.
I also can start typing the words that interrupt my train of thought.
Someone started a thread about why no one uses the -ed on past tense words anymore. In my case, it’s because I somehow think the full word but leave off the -ed by accident!
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. a cite
Which is actually correct as is. Its constant companion:
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.
Is orthographically incomplete.A cite, with cites.