interstate highway to Cupertino?

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jul 22, 2009, at 5:26 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

>
> At 7/22/2009 03:41 AM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>> even nicer would be cases where someone dropped the r in writing and
>> then noticed the omission at the time and fixed it.  but for that
>> you'd have to be collecting people's self-corrections, which involves
>> looking in real time at the process of writing.
>
> Can be done -- has anyone performed experiments with keystroke
> recording software?  (Or, for that matter, MS Word keeps a record,
> for the Undo command.)

yes, i realized it can be done, and i'm pretty sure it has been.  if i
recall correctly, back before electronic data entry, there were even a
few people who doggedly set out to recall all their own typos in
production (including in handwriting).  not an easy task.

i'm away from my library on errors, and i can't easily check out the
psycholinguistic literature on typos.  (googling on "keystroke errors"
gets a lot of practical stuff, on avoiding or reducing such errors,
detecting and correcting them automatically, and the like.)

arnold

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