Andrew Denny said on September 18, 2003 at 08:18 AM

This reminds me of the British schools examiner who one year collected 109 different spellings of the word ‘Bureau’ from the answers to a single exam paper.  (hope I got that one right - there’s no spell checker in this comment box!)

It also brings to mind the issue of people who will deliberately misspell their emails in order to make it look as if they are working harder.

Rick Renfrow said on September 18, 2003 at 12:57 PM

This result is not surprising.  Speech-to-text programs are often stymied by misspellings, but human readers will often “miss” them.

When I taught keyboarding (typing), I invited students to retype a “letter perfect” page of a compelling text and pass it amongst their peers for thorough proofreading… Even the best performers were humbled that their peers could readily find typos that they themselves had missed.  Earlier, in a corporate wordprocessing pool, I found that hot-fingered keyboarders routinely produced perfect copy without a clue about the content of what they just typed! 

In spite of its marked simplicity, the Soundex algorithm (developed by the US Census) identifies similar sounding names/words with remarkable accuracy.  After the first letter, Soundex simply categorizes letters into a half-dozen sound-alike groups (enumerated with a single digit).  The Soundex code for both “Sean” and “Shawn” is S500.

Inspired by the simplicity of the Soundex algorithm, I created a reading speed determinant that simply devotes 90 milliseconds to each contiguous vowel group (and selected punctuation marks).  It instantly calculates “silent” reading speed with amazing accuracy.  If I double the delay (180 milliseconds), it very accurately predicts my “aloud” reading speed too.  This tool is quite handy for timing speeches, presentations and newsletter articles.  I implemented it as a Word macro (for documents) and a bookmarklet (for web pages).

And as a web developer, I find it very useful to minimize time for page loading and user reading.

Max SHepin said on October 2, 2003 at 12:59 AM

Im Russian. Want to inform you that it works on my own language too. It is interesting, how affairs with east languages with the letter from the right on the left ???

Lisa said on October 8, 2003 at 07:23 PM

When I get emails from colleagues and friends—spelling and punctuation count! Mistakes, particularly dropped capitalization and punctuation, are distracting, especially because I know that they’re a product of laziness, not honest ignorance or oversight.

But what a great way to teach kids to write! Too many kids learn to be “afraid” to write because of all the “rules.” The important thing about writing is finding a voice and deciding what to say—the rest you can look up during the editing process.

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