I feel I am very open and clear about the fact that my spelling and grammar are poor. In fact I believe it was one of my weaknesses discussed during my job interview. Further references can be found in a file titled ‘Things Brad Thinks he doesn’t do well’, and recently ‘Steps I have taken to improve my grammar’. It is important to note that I fully recognize this feature of myself and that I accept it as part of myself. I no longer maintain a goal to improve on spelling or grammar due to the circumstances described below.
I have known for a long time that I continue to make spelling mistakes and continue to miss these mistakes over and over when proof reading. Although I often use my computer’s built-in spell checker, often it does not find the mistakes either. Normally, the word is spelt correctly it is just the wrong word, for example I may type ‘thing’ instead of ‘think’, or ‘be’ instead of ‘me’. The spell checker recognizes both as correct.
My first attempt at solving this problem was to simply print the document, and read it specifically looking for such areas to correct. This attempt was met however in vain, though I sometimes caught a few mistakes I often made more when attempting to fix them in the original document. The problem eluded me for sometime One day, I was reading aloud a story (one of Grimm’s fairy tales I think) to my wife . I believe I read aloud fairly well, in fact I have had praise from many teachers in school. However, my wife pointed out something as she was reading along with me. After reading one particular paragraph she looked at me and told me that I had missed several of the words in the paragraph and upon reading had substituted the words with my own words. While we both agreed that what I ‘read’ and what was ‘written’ essentially conveyed the same message, nonetheless, I had not ‘read’ what was actually on the paper.
In effect what I had done was to a) pre-read the paragraph to myself, b) paraphrase the paragraph in my own words and c) speak the paraphrased paragraph. The strange thing was that I had no idea I was doing this. In my mind I had simply read what was on the paper. In addition, my wife could point out several errors in punctuation or duplicate words in the book itself! (I guess the editor missed them), and I was oblivious to such things. I found this interesting and decided to see if I could notice what was going on. It didn’t take me long to realize that when reading not only was I paraphrasing paragraphs but I wasn’t even reading them in the right order. I would read about the first 2 sentences of the first paragraph on the page then I would read the last paragraph on the page, then I would read the middle. Somehow, my mind would then reconstruct the story in sequence and I would move on to the next page. In fact, the only time I got confused was if I missed page by accident, I would have to turn back and read the page. I could easily tell someone what the story was about and what was going on and who the characters were (at least the one’s whose names I could pronounce), but I was reading in what seemed to me an abnormal way.
Determined to ‘correct’ this. I took my time and began to read every word in sequence from top to bottom. I found this to be a horribly painful experience. I could not understand what was going on in the story, I would have to re-read the paragraph several times and still could not grasp the meaning beyond the words, and this was very frustrating because all I really cared about was the meaning not the words themselves. So I reached the conclusion that if the meaning is more important then the words themselves, and I grasp the meaning, it really does not matter how I got to the meaning, just that I did.
After searching the Internet a bit, I discovered several puzzles that I remembered from school. In one example a word was duplicated ‘the’ and students are asked to read the sentence aloud, most students miss the extra ‘the’ because their brain ignores it. In another test, whole letters are missing from words and the student is asked to read the sentence. Although, the student realizes the letters are missing they usually have no trouble reading the sentence without the missing letters. So several people may miss things and still find meaning, however, for some reason I don’t seem to notice that I am doing this. At this point I arrived at the following conclusions about myself.
To a certain degree, It makes no difference how the sentences are really arranged or spelling, I can still grasp meaning and often I do not even notice errors or omission of information, I simply fill in the missing information myself and do not even ‘see’ the error.
b. One ‘consequence’ is that although I can grasp the ‘meaning’. I cannot easily recall specific details of facts. This means that if say the sentence states ‘Wait 10 minutes’, I will rephrase as ‘Wait a little while’ and when it comes time for the waiting, I will have to re-find the instruction to re-read the exact time.
Now, when I ‘proof-read’ what I am really doing is pre-reading, getting the meaning, determine if the meaning I am getting matches with what I intended to say. If not I rewrite the text to try and make the reading more clear. At no point do I actually ‘see any spelling’ errors.
So if the purpose of ‘reading’ is to grasp a meaning, and I am grasping the correct meaning then I can conclude that the methodology, however different from the norm, is still sound However how does this apply to the purpose of writing?
Obviously, the purpose of ‘writing’ is to ‘convey’ meaning. However, the author has one more job and that is to consider the audience that is reading. The reader does not care about the audience (others reading the story) only about his/her personal experience but the author must attempt to convey the same meaning to different audiences.
