Why is it difficult to detect spelling errors?

Imagine you've just finished a very important document. You spent a lot of effort to refine each sentence in the best way to fully reflect your thoughts. Then, read it again to find typos, typos, and make sure there are no errors in your text. However, when you submit documents to others, the first thing they notice is not your passionate words but strange basic misspellings. Why so? Have you read it very carefully? If you've ever had questions and encountered this situation, scientists have the answer for you.

Hateful spelling errors. They have destroyed your passionate thoughts expressed in the text making you have to repair and even receive criticism from readers. Obviously, when someone writes a document, they always want the whole content to form to be perfectly displayed and don't want the appearance of errors, especially spelling errors. Another noteworthy point is that misspelled words are words that you know well about, but that can't be discovered during writing. Why is there such a strange thing?

Why can't we discover our own mistakes?

To explain the above problem, Dr. Tom Stafford had a study of misspellings published in the journal of clinical psychology, the latest quarter. Stafford is currently a lecturer in psychology and behavioral science at Sheffield University, one of the UK's largest top universities. According to Dr. Stafford: "The cause of spelling errors can be ignored by writers not because they are silly or reckless, but what they do is very smart. When you write, you trying to convey the meaning of the problem, this is a high level human behavior ".

But for all high-level tasks, your brain will generalize it in a simpler way with components (such as turning letters into words, including multiple words into sentences) to focus on other tasks are more complex (like combining words to express complex ideas).

According to Dr. Stafford: "We do not grasp every single detail, we are not computers or huge databases. Instead, we receive information by feeling and combining it with What we want and extract their meaning When we read another person's text, this mechanism will help us understand the meaning faster but still use less resources from the brain. However, when we read our own content, we already know the meaning that the text wants to convey, because we always believe that the meaning of the article exists there, so we are very It's easy to distract other details, because we can't see our spelling errors because what we see in the text is "struggling" with Africa. The version already exists in our brain. "

Errors can be small details such as reversing characters in a word like "familiar" written into "qune" or "father" written as "cah" . Even complex words that play an important role in highlighting the meaning of the article can also make this mistake.

The behavior of brain instincts when reading content of yourself and of others

Generalization is a standard of all advanced functions undertaken by the brain. This is similar to the way that the brain forms a map of a familiar location, compiling the landscapes, smells and sensations when walking on a road. This form of intellectual map has helped reduce the load on your brain to focus on handling other things.

However, sometimes this mechanism may also be against you. Typically, instead of driving to the company, unconsciously, you go to the girlfriend's house, where you often come to pick her up. Therefore, we can become blind people in detail because the brain has instinctively acted. Likewise, when you reread your own text, the brain knows the destination and needs to unconsciously ignore small details along the way.

This also explains why re-readers are more likely to detect spelling errors in the content you write. Even if you are using words and concepts that are very familiar to everyone, their brains are still new on the knowledge-seeking "journey" that lurks behind the words. your soul. Therefore, readers will naturally pay more attention to the details of the reading process and their brains are still not anticipating the final destination until they read the content.

The brain also has a mechanism to help limit wrong typing, but .?

But even if these are common mistakes and are quite common, some people are still quite difficult to overcome, even if they know in advance they will surely make mistakes. According to research published by Microsoft, the backspace key on the keyboard is the third key to the most used keys on the keyboard. In fact, professional typists, with the ability to type without looking down at the keyboard, have acknowledged, they know that something went wrong even when the content has not been shown on the screen . Explaining this, the researchers believe that the brain has been used to convert thoughts into characters and it will warn the keystroke if they make the slightest mistake such as typing the wrong key. or reverse the position of the characters.

In a study published earlier this year, Dr. Stafford and his colleagues conducted tests, tracking the contents of the computer screen and typing behavior of typists. to determine the error rate. The results showed that the typing speed of these typing experts will be reduced just before the time they misspelled.

In fact, regular typists have gradually formed a map of their subconscious keyboard. When they type, their brains will constantly prepare for the next step in a completely instinctive manner. According to Dr. Stafford: "However, there is a delay between the signals that require keystrokes emitted from the brain and the actual keystroke manipulation. In that moment, your brain has time to analyze the signal. transmitted from the finger by assuming the feeling of the keystroke, when the sense of error arises, the brain sends a signal to the fingers that slows it down so that it has time to adjust. .

How to detect errors in our text?

All keystroke experts know that keystrokes happen too quickly to be able to redirect fingers to correct mistakes. However, Dr. Stafford said that this comes from the same neurological mechanism to help human ancestors make small adjustments to increase the accuracy of launching spears.

Unfortunately, this kind of instinctive feedback does not exist in the process of editing the content of the article, but only during the writing process. When you re-read a completed text, you are trying to deceive your brain that the text is completely alien to you. Therefore, Dr. Stafford suggests that if you want to easily discover your own spelling mistakes, try to find a way to make the text no longer familiar to you. Some tips can be applied such as changing the background color or being more effective than printing it out and reading it for testing or doing anything to make it more "new" to the brain. "

Hopefully, through the article, you can understand more about how the brain works. Since then it can partly explain the cause of the phenomenon raised at the beginning of the article. Hopefully, by grasping the mechanism of the instinctive behavior plus some tips from Dr. Stafford, you will get more perfect articles and limit unwanted spelling errors.