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Wed 17 Sep, 2003 03:14 pm
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist
and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you
can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey
lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe
Hoe d'ya like them onions?
Prolly true. That's what makes proofreading so hard--the brain makes the words seem OK...
Quote:My meme experiment
By now, you've probably read the "Aoccdrnig to rsereach..." meme floating about the web. I talked about it last Friday. Since then, the meme has exploded on the web, and further propagated by Slashdot today.
What I didn't mention the other day is that I was using this as a very informal experiment. I originally received the paragraph by email on Friday. But then I changed it to post to my site. The original version I received was:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.
But then I changed on Friday to:
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
On Monday morning I changed it in my post to:
Aoccdrnig to rsereach at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteres are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Apart from the fact that the original contained some grammatical errors and there were misspellings, I wanted to see how this paragraph propagated in blogspace in different versions.
Before I posted my version, I checked that there were no versions on the web that began precisely with "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch". I also checked on my second rewrite to confirm it didn't yet exist. So now I can use Google to see how far my versions have propagated.
At time of writing, my Friday version is found by Google on 106 sites. The Monday version is not yet found anywhere else. So basically, this shows that my Friday version spread pretty quickly through blogspace when it wasn't yet floating all over the web but the latest version which has only had a day to propagate in an already saturated web, hasn't made any impact, presumably because everybody already knows about it or people are just linking to the entry without copying the text now.
Like I said, it's not a scientific experiment, but still an interesting one to see how memes spread.
[Update: Tuesday morning - google now finds 206 copies of my Friday version, 8 copies of the Monday version.]
source: salon.com,Monday, September 15, 2003 :
My meme experiment
cool - makes 100% sense to me
25 years ago when I was taking the "Evelyn Wood Speed Reading" class, they demonstrated this effect by slipping in some jumbled words into an exercise we were speed reading. Nobody in the class noticed.
Thanx for the provenance, Walter. I didn't know. I got it as an e-mail from a friend who sends me oddities from time to time and thought I'd share it. That it was featured in salon.com just gives it that much more cachet.
Holy moley, Andy, This is the third thread in this forum on the subject. And I got it in an email. Can't remember where else I saw it.
if it is true - why do dyslexics have such trouble reading and writing?
Well, it IS pretty much true - I can read most of the thingies, except ehBeth's, with no problem!
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