I'm sure you've already seen this, but

[sisyphusshrugged]

it's so cool.

"Aoccdrnig to a 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."

via metafilter

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

That makes proofreaders into Gods, you know.

Ginger
hackenblog.com

[(Anonymous)]

Dang, they're right! This is something my husband keeps pointing out, that the human brain notices patterns, and essentially the letters are just shapes.

- Elayne (http://elayneriggs.blogspot.com)

This will upset conservatives

[(Anonymous)]

Really! They're all hot on the Phonics approach to learning reading, as opposed to the Whole Word approach. It's one of those hot-button things you can use to honk off Right Wingers, if you have a mind to.

Stefan

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

It's only almost true. I, like many, learned with a phonics system and did manage to read that paragraph though it was annoying. I know a person who pretty much learned to read on his own usinga whoel word approach and he has trouble with simple misspellings - the patterns no langer match a known reference. So I expect this gimmick can work with many but not all people. And I further suspect that anyone using this to promote whole word or whole language should look deeper into things.

[platosearwax.livejournal.com]

It was almost scary how easy that was to read.

[mearagrrl.livejournal.com]

I think that wouldn't be so easy to read (and it was easy to read) if I hadn't be online for so much of my life now, reading typos and misspellings (including my own, I'm really quite terrible at hitting all the right letters, but letting my fingers get ahead of me in the typing and confusing the order)

[darius.livejournal.com]

Someone just wrote a prorgam to transform text this way on demand:
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/scrmable.pl

[temima.livejournal.com]

But is it cross-linguistic? Since English is known for orthography that doesn't match phonetics (ie, you don't spell words like you say them), the whole word approach is almost compensating.

If I have the time, I think I'll look up similar studies. When I did my senior-year paper for psycholinguistics, one paper I referenced talked about Swedish-speaking dyslexics reading English better than Swedish because of the 'whole word' comphrension.