This is the one part of Hall's Chapter 3 that really stood out for me. I could read the words exactly and I am pretty sure everyone could do the same. But the question is why? Why can we read this perfectly when we are taught to read words from left to right sounding out each letter as we move on from letter to letter? Looking at the individual words on their own, it looks incredibly weird. It shouldn't make sense to read the word "deosn't" as "doesn't." This crazy idea makes me question how our brains truly work in this magnificent way.
Hall says that the reason why this happens is because we do not have to read every letter before we read the whole word. Our eyes simply skim over the letters quickly to form the word which makes my jaw drop. I honestly think this is such a crazy concept that I will never understand. The only way we can read a word is if the first and last letter are in the right place.
Try reading this sentence from Chris McCarthy's Article Can You Read This?:
Were you able to read it? I could read it straight through. Some words caused some confusion to be which made me pause for a little bit, but I could still read through it. Crazy, huh?
I continued to look up some more examples and found these two which I had trouble reading and some others also did too. 1) Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs 2) A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur. | Here is what they really say... 1) Big council tax increases this year have squeezed the incomes of many pensioners 2) A doctor has admitted the manslaughter of a teenage cancer patient who died after a hospital drug blunder. |
After reading these sentences, you can tell that in some cases, it may be difficult to figure out some of the jumbled words. From this you can see that the first and last letter is not the only thing you can use when reading text. Sometimes the placement of the letters have to be in the area where the letter would originally be to understand the word. But overall, it is still a crazy idea to think that we can read words and stentneces eevn if the wrods are jmulbed up.