Presenter Coach
Ideas to improve your communication, presentations and speeches.11 October, 2006
Does spelling matter?
Did you know that according to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae.
The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
This item circulated rather rapidly around the net in mid September 2003. I first saw it on Monday September 15, when I received two copies from unrelated sources. I sent it on, as one does with any interesting piece of information to about a dozen people whom I thought would appreciate it.
About half commented that they had already seen it. This was still a few days before it made the training lists that I subscribe to. On Sunday september 22, it appeared on the back page of the Sydney (Australia) Sunday Telegraph.
To me, the number of people who have been able to understand it, and were amused enough to pass it on rates far more highly than the title of any sandstone research establishment. As an interesting aside, I showed it to my 7 year old daughter, who is still at the conscious competent phase of reading words of that length, and to her it was gibberish.
Again only one example, but I suspect that I will cite it next time I do the only other major bit of stuff that I can't source - the Conscious competent model.
But was there any research at Cambridge University? Probably not. we all know that citing University Research is a common technique employed by scam artists, but before dismissing it out of hand, there was research carried out at another English university.
In a letter to New Scientist magazine on May 1, 1999, Graham Rawlinson of Aldershot, Hampshire, said that his dissertation, written in 1976 at Nottingham University, “showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text.
Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text”.
In a contribution to the group Facilitation mailing list, Graham said: Have been on the radio today, and in the National Press. Interesting that my book on Inventing does not get the cover that my 27 year old research does!
Interesting?"
Graham's web site is www.dagr.demon.co.uk and there is a summary of his PhD thesis at The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition
The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
This item circulated rather rapidly around the net in mid September 2003. I first saw it on Monday September 15, when I received two copies from unrelated sources. I sent it on, as one does with any interesting piece of information to about a dozen people whom I thought would appreciate it.
About half commented that they had already seen it. This was still a few days before it made the training lists that I subscribe to. On Sunday september 22, it appeared on the back page of the Sydney (Australia) Sunday Telegraph.
To me, the number of people who have been able to understand it, and were amused enough to pass it on rates far more highly than the title of any sandstone research establishment. As an interesting aside, I showed it to my 7 year old daughter, who is still at the conscious competent phase of reading words of that length, and to her it was gibberish.
Again only one example, but I suspect that I will cite it next time I do the only other major bit of stuff that I can't source - the Conscious competent model.
But was there any research at Cambridge University? Probably not. we all know that citing University Research is a common technique employed by scam artists, but before dismissing it out of hand, there was research carried out at another English university.
In a letter to New Scientist magazine on May 1, 1999, Graham Rawlinson of Aldershot, Hampshire, said that his dissertation, written in 1976 at Nottingham University, “showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text.
Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text”.
In a contribution to the group Facilitation mailing list, Graham said: Have been on the radio today, and in the National Press. Interesting that my book on Inventing does not get the cover that my 27 year old research does!
Interesting?"
Graham's web site is www.dagr.demon.co.uk and there is a summary of his PhD thesis at The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition
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