Understandign typing errors

Here’s an old, interesting blog post from Language Log about the different types of typing errors and what they mean, but sadly no information on how to fix them.  I have to say that knowing there is science devoted to this particular area of human errors makes me feel much better about the fact that I cannot type a typo-free sentence, and often cannot proofread well enough to find my mistakes.  I must not be as alone as I feel.

Yesterday, Stefan Valdimarsson wrote to tell me about an interesting error in one of my recent posts. It was a typing error, but not one of the common slips of the finger that have been catalogued, counted and modeled over the decades, from D.D. Lessenberry’s 1928 “Analysis of Errors” (published by Corona Typewriters, and reprinted in Dvorak et al., Typewriting Behavior, 1936) to the “Glossary of Terms Including a Classification of Typing Errors” by D. Gentner et al., in W.E. Cooper’sCognitive Apects of Skilled Typewriting, 1983.

This wasn’t a keystroke substitution error, nor a transposition of two sequentially adjacent keystrokes, nor an interchange of keystrokes that are not serially adjacent, nor a migration of keystrokes to a position earlier or later than the canonical order, nor a keystroke omission, nor a keystroke insertion, nor an abstract doubling error (like “aad” for “add”) or alternation error (like “threr” for “there”). Such errors are a fascinating subject, as you can learn by reading David Rumelhart and Donald Norman’s seminal paper “Simulating a skilled typist: A study of skilled cognitive-motor performance“, Cognitive Science 6(1) 1-36, 1982.

But this wasn’t really a keystroke error at all.

Instead, it was a case where I started to type one word, and then, as my attention shifted downstream, my fingers continued with a different, and entirely inappropriate, alternative. I was transcribing some experimental instructions from a (.pdf image of) a paper on “Most Comfortable Loudness for Pure Tones, Noise, and Speech” (discussed in the post “Liberman on Sax on Liberman on Sax on hearing“, 5/19/2008)…

So Philip Roth gets on a bus…

I am not a Philip Roth fan, but I am a Philip Roth talent acknowledger and respecter.  Hearing about this made me actually kind of like him.  For, like, a minute.

So I guess there’s like a Philip Roth bus Tour that takes you to all the major “landmarks of his novels” in Newark?  Members of Weequahic High School’s class of ‘59, in town for their 50th reunion, were on that tour, and guess who showed up?  Philip Roth!

“Omigod, are we excited!” said Marsha Weinstein. “If I had known, I would have brought my books for him to sign. I have all his books.” Jill Goff called out to the author: “I have an empty seat!”

That’s awesome and thoughtful and generous no matter what, but especially because Roth comes across as the most self-obsessed person in the world.  Also, I thought he would only get on a bus full of young-woman, so, you know, good for him?

Everyone’s a critic

So I read your new story.

I have some suggestions.  First, I thought you could kill the beginning.

And the end…not really sure that’s working for me either.

Were you trying to be funny here?

Have you ever met anyone who actually talks like this?

Why is this character so disconnected?  Were you abused as a child?  It’s okay, you can tell me.

That’s about it, I guess.

Working on anything else?

Understanding Cheever

I’m currently reading Cheever’s stories (again), so  I was very excited to read this excellent, long article on his recently published journals. (Particularly because it’s written by Geoff Dyer.)

Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading The Naked and the Dead made him despair of his own “confined talents”. He worshipped Bellow, admired and bitched about Updike, fretted that while Roth was “playing stink finger and grabarse I admire the beauty of the evening star”. Not surprisingly, these admissions of literary inadequacy were always tempered by a wounded defensiveness. Firmly rooted in “the genteel tradition”, his “old-fashioned fiction” about “the country-club set” served as a tacit rebuke to the unfettered excesses of “the California poets”. Actually, some of the fiction – the 1962 story “A Vision of the World”, for example – is stranger than one imagines it to be, or remembers it being, and often has the quality of “violet-flavoured nightmare” that Cheever admired in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

The Journals reveal the germs of much that will eventually be transformed in the fiction. The reflections in “The Death of Justina” (1960) about how the soul might not leave the body but “lingers with it through every degrading stage of decomposition and neglect” is there, almost word for word, in a journal entry from the previous year. After you have read this passage in the starker context of the Journals – Cheever has run out of booze and is thinking of his dead mother while drying dishes – its force in the story is reduced by the knowledge that it has been craftily insinuated into the narrative. Time and again, things we admire in the fiction – the eye for “travelling acres of sunlight”, the telling psychological detail, exuberant lyricism tinged with a residue of the last (or anticipation of the next) hangover – are spilled straight on to the pages of his journal.

The Journals also contain numerous hints of a kind of writer we do not expect Cheever to be. It’s no surprise to find that he can do proto-Carver – “On Sunday afternoon my only brother comes to call. He is told that if he drinks again he will die, and he is drunk” – but we don’t expect him, reflecting on Shea Stadium in 1963, to anticipate the famous opening of Don DeLillo’s Underworld: “I think that the task of the American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony . . . The sense of moral judgements embodied in a migratory vastness.”

It’s aliiiiiiiiiiiive: Gigantic Magazine’s Mini-Monster issue

It’s alive, and it’s awesome.

Oh, were you trying to get some writing done?

Take this Judy Blume quiz instead!

“For her part, Ms. Waldman finds that being bipolar does make it harder for her to gauge ‘”the acceptable boundaries of human discourse.’”

Ha.

Don’t get it twisted

Sure, there’s some new stuff here, but I am still on hiatus.

“You know what to do with your money better than government”

This sentence appears on the “Beliefs of the Republican Party” portion of the new GOP website.

To elaborate: “The Republican Party supports low taxes because individuals know best how to make their own economic and charitable choices,” but why would that matter?

Brain teaser

What’s more ridiculous, the product, or the advertisement selling it?

“Your Favorite Pictures Belong on Your Wrist, Not in a Box or Drawer”

It’s like the chicken or the egg.  You’re right and wrong no matter what.

The baby around that naked lady’s neck is screaming for a reason.  It would prefer to be in a drawer, I think.