in reply to Re: OT (for now): Mis-spelling research
in thread OT (for now): Mis-spelling research

I think your right about the touch-typing skills. I've often wished I taken lessons, rather than teaching myself my 3 1/2 fingers an 1 1/2 thumbs method.

Interesting. Some of that correlates closely with my gut feel based on people I know or worked with etc., but some of it flatly contradicts it, but then my "sample" is quite small, my record one of (notoriously poor) memory, and corrolation, a finger-in-the-air affair.

Without wishing to impune the veracity of your data:), how much of your conclusions are subjective and how much would you say was "pretty accurate"? Dumb question I know, but "ask the horse" and you usually get a pretty good answer:)

This all got started because of an on-line conversation with 3 people, who's opinions I value, all reached disparate conclusions, which is unusual. None of us are linguists, teachers or any other profession that would give any weight at all to our conclusions, but we do generally, more or less, reach agreement after discussion. On this subject, we each had different experiences, and drew different conclusions.

What I'm really looking for is some way to measure the effects of the phenomena (pressure, passion, mind-load), as well as any research data that might be available.

If anyone has any thoughts as to how to write a program (in perl of course) to do this, I'm all ears.

Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
Hooray!
  • Comment on Re: Re: OT (for now): Mis-spelling research

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Re: Re: Re: OT (for now): Mis-spelling research
by jdtoronto (Prior) on Oct 15, 2003 at 16:04 UTC
    BrowserUK,

    I suppose what I am giving you is the distillation of over 30 years of my own schooling, work, teaching and thinking about the subject.

    Firstly, I am pedantic about spelling and try to be the same way about grammar. My parents didn't ensure I got a good education, but I was a voracious reader. After finishing high-school I earned every last cent of my university fees and educated myself. Got a great job and kept on learning. Over 20 years I completed eleven degrees in communications, electronics, mathematics, physics, bio-medical engineering and history. For 20 years I essentially worked in research, but when I started lecturing at universities I got a rude shock. My entire career was about doing the research and commununicating the ideas to others. But as a lecturer I found this was not so important. In 1992 I resigned my third part time teaching post (one in UK, one in US and then one in Australia) after having been taken to the faculty board three times with complaints of unfair treatment when I expected dissertations to be intelligible and was challenged when I marked them down for poor English.

    Each of us, coming from our own place, will perceive things differently. I don't doubt that your colleagues have different experiences, they start from a different place and got where they are by different routes I would expect. To be honest my samples may not be too large either. I don't think any of my classes had more than 15, maybe 20 students, my fields of specialisation being quite esoteric. My work experience was always in small groups, researchers tend to be that way! But within LARGE research institutes or institutions where the lunch room talk amongst my colleagues and I was often the problems they saw with rooky graduates. I was usually in the fundamental/bleeding edge team that had no more than 6-10 people at any given time.

    I had best stop, you got me onto one of my hobby horses!

    jdtoronto

[reply]

      jdtoronto Thanks for taking my dumb question seriously, and for giving me something to weight your findings against.

      If I ever find a way of measuring this to any degree, maybe you'll be open to trying it out:)

      Examine what is said, not who speaks.
      "Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
      "Think for yourself!" - Abigail
      Hooray!
[reply]
      it's quite likely that the slaps on the wrist for correcting bad spelling/grammar were of a political nature. With universities (thanks to government initiatives) preferring overseas students to local talent. My father noticed a curiosity at my graduation: the vice chancellor did not shake the hand of any of the overseas students. I have seen several assignment papers written by overseas colleagues at uni., and the papers were hardly understandable, let alone of a university standard... At work I've found Australians to be the worst spellers, even well read individuals. My own spelling is not perfect, but i'm a compulsive (bracketeer) I guess an overflow of connected ideas makes for some atrocious grammar and lengthy sentences. A number of unscrupulous individuals have cashed in on people's typing/spelling mistakes, by setting up XXX websites on domain names that are misspelt proper names, eg. dinsey instead of disney.
[reply]

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