{"id":770,"date":"2019-01-14T16:28:55","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T15:28:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com?p=770"},"modified":"2021-01-11T11:38:16","modified_gmt":"2021-01-11T10:38:16","slug":"the-art-of-making-sense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/?p=770&lang=en","title":{"rendered":"The art of making sense"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Colin Rae <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be fair,\nmuch of the dialogue is fast, cumbersome and set against a flurry of sound\neffects. During filming, Harrison Ford \u2013 exasperated at trying to wrap his\ntongue around clunky lines \u2013 remarked to George Lucas, \u201cYou can write this shit\nGeorge, but you can\u2019t say it.\u201d There\u2019s a scene in the movie in which the\nMillennium Falcon is being pursued by enemy fighters and Luke Skywalker says to\nHan Solo, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you outrun them, I thought you said this thing was fast.\u201d\nWe heard \u201cWhydonchatrunem, I thought you said this thing was fast.\u201d Unable to\nunderstand, we just decided that \u201cWhydonchatrunem\u201d was some expression of\nannoyance or surprise that simply belonged in the Star Wars universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another\nexample from the same film is \u201cLock X-foils in attack positions,\u201d which\ninstructs X-wing pilots on their way to a dogfight to adjust their wings to\nattack mode. What my brain did with this was \u201cLuck as falls in attack\npositions.\u201d I thought this was the squadron leader essentially wishing the\nother pilots good luck for the battle. My brain was twisting the sounds to make\nsomething else that\u2019s plausible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When your\nbrain works against you<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our brains\ndo this all the time, which is why as a proofreader it\u2019s sometimes hard to spot\nerrors. Many advertisers have used this very ploy in recent years, probably\nmost notably the brand French Connection in Britain with its FCUK. It\u2019s also\nbeen shown that we can read and understand even quite lengthy texts in which\nthe letters have been jumbled up. Perhaps you\u2019re familiar with the following internet\nmeme:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aoccdring to rscheearch at Cmabrigde\nUinervtisy, it deosn\u2019t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are in, the olny\niprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the source of this research is debated<\/a>, the core statement that letter order doesn\u2019t necessarily prevent readers from understanding the message is true \u2013 although, as an actual Cambridge-based researcher points out here<\/a>, changing the order does have an impact on the effort required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So imagine\nyou\u2019re proofreading a 200-page document \u2013 how do you stop your brain from\nskipping over things? A colleague of mine recently came across this tip: When you’re editing a paper, change the font\nto something unfamiliar. Then change the font size. When you’re familiar with a\npiece, your eyes gulp whole passages and miss typos and other grammatical\nerrors. New fonts focus your eyes on each word and letter. <\/em>You might also\ntry reading the text aloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But let\u2019s say I\u2019m proofreading a PowerPoint presentation. I really don\u2019t want to start messing around with fonts and text sizes, and in the office I don\u2019t 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 \u2013 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waht are yuor tpis for mkanig srue you dno\u2019t msis ayntihng?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our brains are determined to make sense of things, including everything we read. But this means we gloss over errors, which in turn makes proofreading harder. A few thoughts on how this works and how we can make sure we catch every error.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[268,541,527,542,543],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":786,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions\/786"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}