A proofreading sim
I’d like a proofreading sim, please, that all my students could play…
— Andy Havens, in this thread on Terra Nova
Proofreading sim: slurp a text file, pop words on screen scrolling by, put randomized typos in them, require the user to buzz in when the word is spelled wrong. Sounds like a game to me! Bad spellers need not apply!
When I was a practicing journeyman letterpress printer (both my wife and I did this in college) we learned the way to proofread under those “no takeback” sorts of circumstances: read each word in isolation, one at a time, in a group, with a pause between each word, sometimes spelling out the whole word as you went.
It.
Forced.
Attention, a-t-t-e-n-t-i-o-n.
On.
Each.
Word.
…which is of course a big part of the challenge of proofing text, because that’s not how we read — we read words holistically, not by piecing them together out of letters.
In any case, it would be interesting to see if making a game like this would make someone into a more accurate proofreader.
14 Responses to “A proofreading sim”
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That’s not how I read. As a kid, I probably learned to read using the phonics method, not the whole language method. I sound out each word in my head while I’m either writing or reading, which indicates to me that I read by processing pieces of each word into attractive patterns of sounds. Phonics uses the term digraphs to refer to these pieces. (Does anyone else “hear” an internal “voice” when they read, write, or think?)
As I write this, there’s one comment and one “Trackbacks & Pingbacks” entry. A 50/50 ratio, though after I post this comments will be 2/3 of the entries here.
I wonder, are “trackbacks and pingbacks” there solely for the authors and editors of web content, so they can see where they’ve been linked from and who’s “talking about” them? Or are they supposed to be of some use or interest to us readers? I have to say, in the years since “trackbacks” showed up on the web, I’ve never found them to be anything but “stuff I have to skip past to get to real content”. Not once ever.
Sorry to be off topic, but I’m just wondering if there’s some real use for those that I’m just not seeing. This one seems to say A) Raph made a post about the idea of a proofreading sim (which I already knew from reading the post), and B) this info was mentioned by someplace/someone I never heard of in my life (nor want to) called “Exectweets”. Though if it said “The New York Times reported that Raph posted about a proofreading sim” that would only be the tiniest bit more interesting to me anyway.
Raph, what are trackbacks for and why are they all over the web now? Help me out here, I just don’t get it.
Both, I think.
Ideally, they would be limited to posts and such that comment on it, so that readers of one post can continue reading on topic, where others have written in response to the original. Somewhat like a “see also”.
I personally find them interesting when they’re not an indiscriminate side-effect of aggregation, and irritating when they are.
Raph… nice… though I’m not as interested in spelling as I am in the students being able to read their own work for major grammatical and sense errors. Spell checkers can take care of the most egregious stuff, and I’m not a great speller myself. I do care, though, that the sense of writing can be lost (or greatly diminished) when young writers don’t have enough experiences of having to read and critique their own work. Having a spelling error can make you seem careless; a major grammatical or sense error can make you sound like an idiot.
Trackbacks were a lot more useful when the blogosphere was more about cross-blog conversations. That happens a lot less these days.
Morgan, does that mean that you have trouble with the trick whereby wodrs aer speleld wtih jsut one letetr off but the frist and lsat ones are corerct? Most people can read that at near normal speed because of how words are recognized by the brain.
Morgan, I think Raph’s referring more to the fact we don’t process words by letters but rather as single units, once we’ve become accustomed to reading. For instance, it’s been shown that only the first and last letter of the word need to actually be in the right place. The brain chunks the data after that, and pulls up what it thinks is the correct word, regardless of the placement of the middle letters. You can wirte a setnence lkie tihs and it’s sitll cmoperehnsilbe.
We still hear all the sounds, etc, but we’re hearing them already knowing what the next sound in the sequence is going to be, so if it’s written wrong, we’re less likely to notice. Of course, if you had to stop and sound out each grouping of letters in absence of your brain already having a sense of what the word is, reading would be painfully slow.
Not a linguist, so I can’t explain. Personally, I think we just use several learned memory/visual techniques to make that happen. Most people probably couldn’t make sense of that sentence if they had never encountered the words that were reconfigured.
Of course they couldn’t, but that’s not the point. The people doing proofreading have come in contact with all those words, or they wouldn’t be very good at doing their job. You have to deliberately slow down the process if you want to recognize errors as a result.
It’s not about how we learn to read, but how we read once we’ve learned.
This actually makes me think of Silent Conversation. A side scroller with words. It’s pretty interesting how as you play, you read (and avoid the powerful words).
http://armorgames.com/play/4287/silent-conversation
I present to you the game I.M. MEEN, an awesome Windows 95/DOS game I played as a kid. It’s a game from Animation Magic, so the intro looks like those old Zelda CD-i games everyone makes fun of.
It had “DOOM” like gameplay but your goal was to find special scroll doors where you had to correct the grammar and punctuation on them so that they would open and free the trapped kid inside.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.M._Meen
I was taught phonics in the early 60s although I’d learned to read from commercials and billboards before starting school. Yes, I hear a voice in my head when reading sometimes even saying the same thing as what I’m reading. 😉 It turned out to be an advantage years later when I had to learn hours worth of lyrics or play scripts and recite them and a handicap when required to do fill dead air on stage riffing jabber between songs.
As a tech writer early in my technical career, an older writer taught me to read sentences backward. That broke up the sentence structure sufficiently to keep the driver context from correcting spelling in context when in fact it is misspelled. One might think spell checkers have helped. My limited experience reading online texts these days suggests the opposite. Spelling skills appear to be declining.
I can comprehend those easily but it slows me down and forces me to look at each word; whereas, otherwise, I read at a higher level of sentence structure and read quite a bit faster.
len, that reading backwards trick is really good. Anything that forces your brain out of the context it’s used to prevents it from chunking the data it’s receiving. Something similar happens in drawing, where if you turn an image upside down, your brain processes it as a bunch of lines instead of an object and it’s easier to duplicate accurately.
I would prefer to retain context wherever possible and try to keep things at a sentence or paragraph level.
How about a game which starts off by presenting the user with simple sentences and asks them to find a set number of spelling errors in as short a time as possible? This could then expand to grammatical errors and errors of style and context, before requiring all of the above at once.
The challenge would be based on time and accuracy, while the difficulty could be altered by increasing the amount and complexity of the text, the type of errors to find and by removing hints (such as the total number of errors to be found). This could be complemented by minigames such as the system you proposed in your opening post. Throw in an online scoreboard and some achievements (brr…) and voilá.