Calling All Verbivores, Harold Fox

Having received, just today, the following block of text (or close approximation thereof) for the fifth time in barely more than a year, I give in and make it the subject of this number of “Calling All Verbivores” (CAV).

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Even if you haven’t seen this in one of its many trips through cyberspace, you probably do not find it very surprising. After all, we have all learned that one of the reasons uppercase text is harder to read than regular sentence case is that the uppercase text does not have the ascenders and descenders. Pattern recognition is a source of clues for recognition and decoding the text. One thing we can draw from the Cambridge findings is that the first and last letters of a word are critically important in the pattern it presents.

There are, however, some other things that should be said about this interesting example. First of all, more is going on in successful reading of the passage than the pattern recognition of individual words. Notice that the passage is, aside from the scrambled inner letters, a paragraph in standard English. Therefore, the reader has aid from the context clues of the text as a whole. In addition, the words of three or fewer letters are not scrambled. As I reported in my preceding number of CAV, it has been reckoned that 25 words account for a third of all English writing. Of those 25, only “that,” “with,” and “have” contain more than three letters. Even a systematically applied scrambling of the inner letters in all words in a paragraph of text would leave unchanged as helpful guideposts any of those 22 remaining frequently used words. By my count, 32 of the 69 words in the example above are included in that 22. They, also provide context clues that aid the reader.

Another point of interest to all of us is this. The example and its self-contained interpretation illuminate our common experience. It helps us understand why it is so difficult to spot a misspelling or typo in proofreading, especially in the midst of our own writing. The pattern recognition and the familiarity of the text can combine to make us miss wrong, scrambled, or missing letters in an individual word.

A slightly ironic illustration of the foregoing point is found in the example reproduced above. I saved the first example I received of the scrambled text by copying directly to a Word file. I certainly did not want to key it in! I finally found, only after beginning this piece, that whoever had keyed in the text had substituted an “e” for the “a” in the scrambled version of “important.” If a typo or misspelling can be hard to find in regular text, imagine how much harder it would be in scrambled text. Comparison shows that other versions of the scrambled example I received did not have that particular error.

Another reflection came to me after playing around with words scrambled according to the pattern applied in the sample. The way the inner letters are scrambled seems to me to make a difference. In other words, the sample could have been more difficult to read with the same words but with the inner letters scrambled differently. That may be a subjective judgment. Try if for yourself. Also, longer words are more difficult to decode from a scrambling of the inner letters. Try that for yourself, too.