Oops, I Did It Again…

Grammatical errors can be embarrassing, but the reasons we make them are surprisingly high level

Imagine you are tasked with writing an important report for work. Hours are spent on meticulous research; you take pride in making sense of complex, hard-to-grasp concepts. You meticulously read and then re-read all the text for grammatical errors then press send, perhaps allowing yourself an inward glow of satisfaction over submitting a well written report. Leaving your desk for a break, you can’t help but glance at your screen on return. Mortified, you immediately spot not just one, but a few glaringly obvious spelling errors.

Of course in certain scenarios these typos may cost us dearly. Aside from the embarrassment factor reaching 10 on the scale, a ‘dead cert’ job interview may not materialize (errors on a CV are judged harshly), or you may be overlooked for a coveted job promotion.

Grammar Errors and Typos: A Trick of the Brain

So would it make you feel any better to realise that far from being considered careless or sloppy, most linguistic experts agree that these mistakes occur because trying to convey meaning in your writing is actually a high level task? No one, it seems, is immune to this type of ‘brain trickery’ –even seasoned professional report writers and journalists. And the culprit? Associative coupling, also known as associative grouping.

These are terms used to describe repetitive words used in conjunction with one another — words such as ‘their and there’, ‘your and you’re’ and ‘too and to’. According to Tom Stafford, lecturer in Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield (UK), the simplification of sentences and letters occurs so we can focus on more complex tasks (like combining sentences into complex ideas). “We’re not like computers or NSA databases… we don’t catch every detail,” explains Stafford. “Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”

Put simply, although you may believe that your report, essay or CV is word perfect, your brain may not allow time to process our written words as quickly as our thoughts. In other words, your brain knows the grammar rules, but other factors override that knowledge. This also explains why we can view other people’s typos but don’t see our own — what we see on the screen competes with the version that exists in our heads.

Sounds Like a Typo

Maryellen MacDonald, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) has studied how the brain processes language. Her theory is that the brain stores words like a network — for easy retrieval — rather than a dictionary. You start with a concept you want to express and then unconsciously consider several options from its associative grouping — and quickly select one.

Sound is also used by the brain to aid its expression. “Usually we pay a lot of attention to pronunciation while we’re typing because it’s usually a really good cue how to spell things — but homophones can trip this process up,” says MacDonald. “When someone types ‘Are dog is really cute’, it’s not that they don’t know the difference between ‘are’ and ‘our’; it’s that the pronunciation of ‘our’ in the mind activated the spelling ‘our’ but also ‘are.’”

So if familiarization handicaps our ability to pick out mistakes, how can we lessen the risk? The key, according to Stafford and other experts, is to pretend you are proofing a document for the first time. Visual tricks to help your work look less familiar will help, such as changing the font or even the background color. Printing out the text to edit copy by hand can also focus the mind.

So next time you slip up grammatically, remember… it’s high level thinking and not necessarily your’e [sic!] fault.