Ask HN: Why do we do orthographic mistakes on keyboard but not in handwriting? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do we do orthographic mistakes on keyboard but not in handwriting?

2 pointsicare_1er6 comments

This is something that's troubled me for some time. Whether I write in English or in my native language, I sometimes make gross orthographic mistakes which are clearly pronounciation-relate, for instance I would write "sean" for "seen" or "plaid" for "played".

I have noticed that I am not the only one.

However, this never happens when manually writing with a pen.

That seems to indicate that somehow, keyboard-typing or manual-handwriting are a different brain operation/circuit.

View on HN

I make writing mistakes constantly with a pen. My brain is multiple letters ahead and whether I'm writing in cursive or in plain old print I will be ahead of myself and be sometimes writing the wrong letter in the wrong order.

And it's not like I manually handwrite things rarely. That's my go-to thing when I need to sketch out an idea because on the computer you are constrained in ways that you just aren't with your hands. I can write anything the way I want with analog accuracy as opposed to type and write anything the way I want on a computer with digital accuracy which is more precise. Sometimes you don't want precision in a digital sense when you want things to have that analog messiness.

English is my native language and I've always been like this and I'm 34 years old.

What's your ratio of handwritten words to typed? Is this an even sample or could it be that very few now haven't done the bulk of their lifetime writing with a keyboard of some sort?

In fact, how much reading of hand written text have you done? You know, where this kind of error could be seen? I suspect not much, because not many people write anything like that much anymore.

40 years ago I helped type my father's writings, from legal pad first drafts. He gave up longhand drafts and went straight to keyboard not long after that. I suspect I'm fairly rare in having had this experience.

Typing is faster than hand-writing (at least for any decent touch-typist).

I do make mistakes mostly related to muscle memory instead (the example I hit often is not top of mind, but imagine typing "best" instead of "bet" because I type "best" much more often).

Your examples definetely don't resonate with me, especially since I'd read "sean" as "Shaun" or "Shawn", and "plaid" with a very long "a". IOW, they are vocally very different.

I am not a native English speaker, but I have been a heavy user for 20+ years.

The examples I picked are not actual because I don't remember or record actual situation when it happened, but I actually started this discussion on an online board after noticing another member having made gross mistakes in their typing.

Yes, I make mistakes in written english too, but they are of a different nature, for instance, I would never start writing "dee fay rent" in handwriting, but these types of typos have happened in the past when typing.

> definetely

So much for my English ;) Can I use the excuse of typing "define" more often so I typed that out before "definite(ly)" just like I said my muscle memory makes me do?

This happens to me with pen and paper all the time. For example I sometimes automatically write "your" using the hiragana or katakana character "yo" with an English lowercase r after it. IMO the mind thinks this combination is more appropriate given the sound of the word being written.

Similar things happen with writing shorthand, like "yr" for "your" even though I'm trying to write out the full word in regular English and the letterforms should not be regular English when using shorthand anyway, but that's how they come out.

Not to discount the possibility that keyboard typing is still somehow different in this way though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com