fill in the blanks

Have you ever written a paper, re-read it to make sure there were no mistakes, maybe even re-reading it again just to be certain, only to have it come back with red pen marks indicating mistakes? I know I have. In fact, I still do that when I write things. I go back and re-read blogs which I have probably already read multiple times after writing them only to discover silly spelling and grammatical mistakes. I wrote an incident report for work once that was so good it was used as an illustration at our annual meeting. Then, of course, a friend and co-worker pointed out that I had misspelled my own name. I re-checked it numerous times. How did I miss it? I blame the amazing ability of our minds.

We can misspell words and forget letters and add extra words, but often times our minds still read the sentence the way it was intended.

One such common mistake is when we write the same word twice. The red squiggly lines in MS finds this error quickly, but I still do this all the the time. Did you catch it? Did you notice the second the in that sentence? If not, read it again. Most people's minds probably eliminated the second occurrence of that word.

Another common mistake is using the wrong spelling of a word that sounds like another word but is spelled differently (homophones). Let's face it, we might not always choose the write spelling, but most people's mind simply replaces it with the correct word. Did you catch that one? That might have been easier. If you missed it, I wrote "write" instead of "right." Whether or not you noticed it, I bet you understood the sentence as I intended it.

The results of a study dealing with how our mind reads things became a popular email a few years ago. In case you haven't seen it, or to simply refresh your memory, here is the content of that email:

I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt! See if yuor fdreins can raed tihs too.

You have to admit, the mind is a pretty amazing thing!