Actually, this might just be a question about my typing habits.
So, I’m typing along and I notice that I’ve hit a bad key at the beginning of a longish word (maybe even a longish word that’s a few words before the word I’m in the middle of typing).
Having seen the typo, I want to fix it before I go on. So, I hit the delete key until I’m all the way back to the typo, then I retype it all correctly.
Now, it strikes me that this is a pretty inefficient way to correct the typo. Surely I would be better off moving the cursor and fixing the one faulty keystroke rather than doing all that deleting and retyping.
But here’s the thing: I suspect it might be even more work to retrain myself to fix my typos more efficiently.
How do you deal with your own typos on the fly? Have you always done it that way, or did you have to break yourself of another habit before you settled into the one you have now?
I do it the same way you do it. Since I’ve been sitting at a keyboard of one kind or another for over 50 years, I’m not very interested in changing my ways. I’m willing to make major changes in my life, but not the fussy little details.
If it’s in a thought I’m still in the middle of, I backspace and correct them. I usually notice it before I’ve gotten in more than one or two more characters in (usually without even looking at the screen), so the return on investment of retraining myself is unlikely to be positive, even for the times I end up retyping one or two lines.
If I’ve finished the thought the typo is in, it goes in the “need to change that” queue, and I eventually go back and change it (but even there I usually change the whole word, since I can usually do that at least as fast as I can find and change one or two letters).
(When I did timed typing tests in high school, this drove the teacher nuts, since the “right” way to do it is to keep going and correct all of the errors in a batch at the end (or, for timed typing tests, count them and use that to reduce your score according to some magic formula). But somehow even with the “extra delay” this gave me I was still one of the fastest typists in the class.)
I find I can usually type faster than I can think, especially on a decent keyboard, so doing it this way (which minimizes the amount I have to think about it) is probably more efficient than minimizing the typing work anyways.
I move the cursor, correct the error, and put the cursor back in place. I’m not a fast typist, and I usually catch most errors within a word or two. This method probably arises from the fact that I did a great deal of editing and proofreading for others before doing original writing of my own. (I did college and grad school *way* before the age of computers.)
For me it depends on how I’m typing. For webpages (like this one), I’ll usually do exactly as you describe.
But if I’m in a vim I’m much more likely to navigate to the error and correct it. I think this is mostly because I can do this in vim without having to have my hands move around the keyboard (except to hit escape).
I backspace up to the error, fix it, and move on. BTW it just enrages me when Word assumes it knows what I want and ‘fixes’ it for me – seeing the autocorrect in action utterly breaks my concentration where simply correcting my own error does not. I prefer writing in a ‘simple’ text-editor application like Notepad++ – it is nearly as well-mannered as a typewriter.
(The day I need a machine to tell me what I want to say, you can drop ‘n bury.)
The ‘correct’ way to correct, if there is one, is however you feel most comfortable doing it.
I backspace through the word like you do. Then I retype the word. Sometimes I get the same mistake and have to do it again.
The whole time I’m thinking, why not just hit Ctrl backspace, you idiot? Why?????
One thing (of many of course) that I learned from my thesis advisor was the use of the arrow keys to move the cursor through words, and the use of the delete key for forward delete (opposite of backspace). If you’re moving your hands from the keyboard to use the mouse to position the cursor, it’s a big waste of time.
Another helpful thing is holding ctrl- while using the arrow keys. That will skip the cursor along the entire word. And ctrl+shift and arrow will highlight that entire word, allowing you to ctrl-x, -c, etc. on it.
I usually [CTRL]+[DEL] the entire word. I still need to retype the whole thing, but at least I don’t need to hit backspace seven times.
I stop the moment I make the error. I backspace and retype. While this may seem wasteful, I think it’s simply smart use of the resources in play.
Any touch-typist has a huge amount of ‘memory’ in how to type, all the way from the brain out to the finger muscles, and from the tactile feedback from the fingertips and the proprioceptive feedback of the muscles going all the way back to the brain, and the looping includes whatever parts of the brain compose, edit on the fly, and generate correct spelling and grammar. When you are running something closed-loop, you rely upon the loop to correct errors, rather than break the loop, correct in some other way, and then try restarting the loop mid-word.
I used to be able to type really well on a computer. Under CP/M and DOS.
Then some nitwit got rid of the WordStar cursor diamond keys, and moved the Control key from left of the A where God intended it down to somewhere under the heel of the hand.
Now I have to hit something like Alt-leftarrow (kids, don’t try this in Firefox …)
No more 100wpm, including errors, after that.
Now I just rip the whole sheet out of the computer and type it over from the beginning and try to get it right.
References:
http://www.uni-ulm.de/uni/intgruppen/memosys/symbol07.htm
Revenge effects and the Software Industry
How the Software Industry does its best to undo the productivity gains of computers…
http://www.wordstar.org/wsemu/word/pages/faq.htm
Orthodox Editors Page
Science Fiction Writer Robert J. Sawyer
WordStar A Writer’s Word Processor … quick-cursor-movement menu prefix, extends the power of this diamond. …
http://www.softpanorama.org/Tools/editors.shtml
One more, because it sets out exactly why this worked so well for so many people:
http://www.mischel.com/diary/2005/08/22.htm
I’m with you. I think because I learned to type on a typewriter (I’m not that old, just from an underfunded school district) I learned to correct mistakes as I go. It’s more efficient that way with a typewriter, of course.
Plus, I type quickly enough that it is faster to backspace even several words to fix a typo than it is to reach for the mouse and cursor over before correcting the mistake.
Depends where the goof is: if it’s only a few (actually, typing this, I see it’s around 10-20) chrs back, I backspace to it. If it’s further back than that, I grab the mouse and move the cursor, fix it, put the cursor back and start typing again.
If I’m just a couple of characters away, I delete them and retype. If I have already typed past, I’ve learned – taught myself – to just ignore it and finish the entire paragraph. By the time I’ve written it, I may often decide to redo the paragraph structure anyway to make for a clearer argument and so I’ll correct any errors at that time.
I wondered why no one mentioned this until Nat did: yes, it’s worth learning the keyboard shortcuts for navigating a word at a time, with or without deleting in the process, and for going to the beginning and end of a line. It makes it lots faster to correct errors without having to retype everything.
[And forget about using the mouse to reposition yourself: the most inefficient thing you can do when you’re typing is to switch back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse. Apart from its making you move your hands too much, the cognitive break caused by the context switch is deadly.]
I once auditioned for a job as typist. Before I started typing I was told, “Don’t worry about the mistakes, keep typing. You can come back and correct them later.” The point was, it takes longer to keep coming back to correct mistake you keep making, than to continue typing until you’re done, and then fix your mistakes. And it’s less frustrating.
So type until your thoughts are down on paper, then go back over the material and correct your errors. When you’ve done that, you should find places in the text where you can better organize your thinking and make your presentation more effective.
Another is to double click short words, five letters or less. That way you can type the word again without worrying about putting the i-beam precisely where it needs to go.
what Nat said…
But what I want to know is how to navigate word by word on a mac keyboard. (crtl+ arrow makes an error sound; Shift+arrow selects and moves; command + arrow moves to the front of the line… moving just one word)
I used to teach people this stuff so some rules:
Anything you do more than three times per document, look up the shortcuts.
Do not rely on speelchuckers. If you can’t spell, shw it to someone who can before releasing a document into the wild.
Learn how to use spelechackers. Right click on most programs on an underlined word will give you a list of possible corrections. Get a mouse with at least two buttons! (Yes, I’m a Mac user, but I’m not stupid.)
In general, control/command key shortcuts for cut, copy, paste, move one word/paragraph left or right, and extending selections (usually with the shift key) is what you need at a minimum. Formatting shortcuts too.
Deleting until you get to the error and then retyping from that point is an invitation to introduce new errors. It’s all about error minimisation: retype as little as possible so that you add as few new errors. The basic error rate, for efficient systems, is about 3 errors per 200 characters, or 98.5% accuracy. If you retype after backspacing, you add 3 new errors for every 200 characters you retype. Really good typists bring that up to 99% or so, but they do not do that trick anyway.
I do the exact same thing. I think that it’s cognitively easier to stay in “typing mode” and hit backspace a bunch, instead of switching over to the mouse to move the cursor to the exact spot where the typo is, fix it, and then move the cursor back to the end of the word.
It seems like it would be faster too (unless perhaps you’re typing supercalifragilisticexpealidocious), but I can’t say that I’ve sat down at the computer with a stopwatch and a spreadsheet to compute error-correction-speed.
I only backspace if I catch the error when I’m still “within” the word being typed. If I catch it later, I’ll go back, highlight it, and just start retyping the word. Or click, delete, retype if it’s just a letter.
That said, I have a friend who corrects errors like you do, but he will backspace through whole sentences, sometimes more than one, and retype.
It drives me crazy. I’m always like (slow motion) “NOOOOOOOO! You don’t have to retype EVERYTHING, you fool!”
John Wilkins wrote:
I don’t know if that’s true. I rephrase things a lot and so I do a lot of “chunk deleting” with the select and just start retyping method, but then I always seem to miss a word or forget to change a verb tense or a plural or something. If my own horribly written posts are any indication, maybe it’s better to just delete it all and start over fresh…
…
Why are you asking, Janet? It’s very Seinfeldian of you
I do it the same way you do, and it’s occurred to me that it might not be the most efficient way. But, like you said, it’s the way you’re used to doing it, and changing that habit is probably more trouble than it’s worth.
If your are using a Mac, you can use Alt+Left or Right to jump around words. Alt+Shift+Left or Right, selects a word at a time.
It works that way at least on my machine using an Icelandic keyboard.
I’ll backspace and type over if it’s the word I’m still typing. Otherwise, moving the cursor (via keyboard) in the most efficient way possible. There’s a lot of different contexts in which you have to edit text so several different editing styles has to be kept in mind; but it’s not usually a problem.
Anecdote: I had a period where I’d refuse to delete my way through a word at all. Cursor keys and single-character deletions only. I kept this up for a good while (6 months?) until it started to seem silly and inefficient.
As others have said, it depends on the editor I’m using. In the office using Outlook, say, I usually finish a paragraph, then Ctrl-left and Ctrl-right to the offending word, arrow key in to it, and make the change. In something like Emacs I would be more prone to delete the entire word with one keystroke as soon as I spot the error and retype it.
vim to the rescue!
+b takes me back almost instantly, then +w +i returns me to where I was.
I believe that only having one way of dealing with typos makes you faster. Plus, you usually have to move your hand more to get to the arrow keys. (As i typed this I noticed that I seem to have a 5-6 character limit to when i backspace and when I simply move the cursor.)
Keyboard shortcut navigation here. Ctrl plus arrow to move a word at a time, Home or End to go to the beginning or end of a line, Crtl plus Home or End to go to the start or end of the file, etc, etc, etc…
I do the same thing; I can’t move forward unless I go back and correct the word. I know it’s inefficient, but I don’t like to leave mangled words hanging on to correct later.
*Hand up* Me too. And a friend, funnily enough this came up in conversation last week. We agreed its inefficient, but we probably wouldn’t change old habits anyway.
In other, related news, Greg Laden’s blog has a post on keyboards shortcuts and how much time humanity could collectively save if every typist used them.
If you take eleven years and divide it by current human population how much time do we save per person?
I do it the way you do. I usually “feel” that I’ve made a typo before the visual registers, so it’s a matter of only backspacing a few characters. I notice a lot more of my typos due to realizing I’ve typed with the wrong fingers right when it happens than actually seeing them on the page, and it’s a lot faster and more efficient to just move a finger a small bit to hit the backspace key than to move all the way over to the mouse to move the cursor.
I go back (delete to the error) and retype, though my typing is really bad. If my wife didn’t use a split keyboard, I would probably run typing games at home to gain skill.
It might be inefficient, but I backspace and will retype up to a sentence for a one-character error. I always go back and proof, though, as I am a poor typist. What I miss with re-types I’ll fix with mouse and cursor. It is funny to me that experienced typists seem to do it that way too!
Writing about typing habits while typing is a very strange experience.
I’ve never really thought about it until now, but from the comments, there appear to be two basic strategies that might reflect hemispheric dominance. If you’re left hemisphere dominant (associated with analysis of minute details), you’re probably a correct-as-you-go typist. If you’re right hemisphere dominant (associated with wholistic analysis), you’re probably a look-it-over-when-you’re-done typist. Now that I think about it, I generally fall into the latter category. However, there are important qualifiers associated with both typing strategies.
Regardless of typing strategy, most will likely not type high frequency words incorrectly when typing on the fly. But if it happens, we are likely to automatically correct it within a few letters since the greater practice with typing such words, results in quicker proprioreceptive feedback than less frequent words (such as proprioreceptive), or certain shorter words that have less to do with this feedback and more to do with semantics (e.g., their/there and affect/effect).
Next, the extent of my conscientiousness with checking for typos depends on who will read what I’m writing. If it’s to a friend, I don’t really bother. If it’s more business-related, and/or a situation where frequent typos would be indicative of careless thought, I tend to be more conscientious.
And then of course, there’s the time of day. If it is somewhere well past midnight, I’m guessing most will automatically spend less time error checking.
As a member of the spell check generation, I never fix anything until the end, then I let the word processor do most of the work for me.
I do exactly what you do up through deleting whole sentences, and I have as long as I’ve been typing. I remember in second grade the girl sitting next to me thought it was silly of me to expend all that “extra” effort.
I do the same thing when I’m reading aloud, even if I’m just reading to myself. If I miss a syllable, stumble on a word, or even accent the words in a phrase incorrectly, I’ll go back to the error and start over. It’s as if I were recording something and needed to get at least one good take.
I tend to finish my current thought before going back to fix any really glaring mistakes. That could be a sentence, a paragraph or the whole document. I’d never dream of backspacing to fix a problem unless it was within the current word. I try to avoid using the mouse (or whatever) to navigate around a document, although it does make sense sometimes.
I learnt to type on a manual typewriter – I’ve even got a typing qualification somewhere – so it made vastly more sense to make corrections at the end and backspacing simply wasn’t an option. It made even more sense not to make mitsakes in the first place.
I don’t make typing mistakes.
Either click into the word after the mistake, delete the wrong characters and retype them, or double-click and retype the whole word.
Do I get to kill Dveduu now, or do I have to wait until later? Or do I have to get in line and wait my turn?
I’m optimized by task.
If typing prose (a blog post, a research paper, whatever)… I finish typing my thought, and then go back and fix any errors that the autocorrect feature didn’t fix for me.
If typing in an IM client, I backspace and correct the typo.
If typing something on a command line, I control-break and start over, as it’s usually faster than backing up.
I try to avoid using the mouse as much as possible. People have been typing for decades, but nobody complained about RSI until they started using a mouse for years
CTRL is your friend! Keyboard shortcuts! Up the Revolution!
If I’m still in the same word, I do it as you described. If I noticed it a few words (or lines) back, I get out my mouse and move the cursor. Sometimes I use the arrow keys but that’s somewhat rare.
I wait until I am done with the paragraph/piece I am writing and then I re-read everything and correct spelling and other mistakes.
Unless I see the typo when I write, then I backspace and delete. (Like when I wrote piece a second ago and started writing peic… and then backdeleteted.)
generally, I notice typos as I make them – I’ve been a touch typist since learning on an IBM Selectric II in the 9th grade…um, twentymumble years ago. I’ll usually delete the word and retype it – as someone else mentioned, there’s a certain rhythm in common typed words – retyping maintains that rhythm in a way that correcting a single letter doesn’t
Other than that I don’t have a standard way of correcting errors.