The art of making sense

By Colin Rae

Like many people of our age, my sister and I watched Star Wars over and over when we were kids. Watching the film again as an adult, I was struck by how much more of the dialogue I understood, or in other words, how much I must have skipped over when I was younger. When I got to think about it, I remembered that we would take the sounds we heard and make them fit into something that made sense to us.

To be fair, much of the dialogue is fast, cumbersome and set against a flurry of sound effects. During filming, Harrison Ford – exasperated at trying to wrap his tongue around clunky lines – remarked to George Lucas, “You can write this shit George, but you can’t say it.” There’s a scene in the movie in which the Millennium Falcon is being pursued by enemy fighters and Luke Skywalker says to Han Solo, “Why don’t you outrun them, I thought you said this thing was fast.” We heard “Whydonchatrunem, I thought you said this thing was fast.” Unable to understand, we just decided that “Whydonchatrunem” was some expression of annoyance or surprise that simply belonged in the Star Wars universe.

Another example from the same film is “Lock X-foils in attack positions,” which instructs X-wing pilots on their way to a dogfight to adjust their wings to attack mode. What my brain did with this was “Luck as falls in attack positions.” I thought this was the squadron leader essentially wishing the other pilots good luck for the battle. My brain was twisting the sounds to make something else that’s plausible.

When your brain works against you

Our brains do this all the time, which is why as a proofreader it’s sometimes hard to spot errors. Many advertisers have used this very ploy in recent years, probably most notably the brand French Connection in Britain with its FCUK. It’s also been shown that we can read and understand even quite lengthy texts in which the letters have been jumbled up. Perhaps you’re familiar with the following internet meme:

Aoccdring to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are in, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae.

While the source of this research is debated, the core statement that letter order doesn’t necessarily prevent readers from understanding the message is true – although, as an actual Cambridge-based researcher points out here, changing the order does have an impact on the effort required.

So imagine you’re proofreading a 200-page document – how do you stop your brain from skipping over things? A colleague of mine recently came across this tip: When you’re editing a paper, change the font to something unfamiliar. Then change the font size. When you’re familiar with a piece, your eyes gulp whole passages and miss typos and other grammatical errors. New fonts focus your eyes on each word and letter. You might also try reading the text aloud.

But let’s say I’m proofreading a PowerPoint presentation. I really don’t want to start messing around with fonts and text sizes, and in the office I don’t want to bother my coworkers by reading things out. What I can do is work at an unhurried pace, take regular breaks and have someone else look over the text – something we do at Klein Wolf Peters as a matter of course. Personally, I enjoy this fanatical attention to detail. Knowing that every letter and punctuation mark has been scrutinised means I can feel comfortable delivering the piece to the customer.

Waht are yuor tpis for mkanig srue you dno’t msis ayntihng?

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