Typo patterns

Most of my "typos" add extra words:

mozilla crashes at with the instruction pointer at an address not in its address space. [bug 157845]
my high school has a comedy sportz team. the team and an informal club that exists around it, and my brother is part of that.

I think my typo pattern has to do with my typing style. I don't compose entire sentences in my head before I start typing them, and I edit heavily. I edit sentences as I type them. For example, a few sentences ago, I typed "before typing them[Ctrl+Left][Ctrl+Left][Ctrl+Shift+Right]starting to type [End]". Later I changed "starting to type" to "I start typing".

I also move information between sentences in order to keep any sentence from being too complicated and to eliminate parenthetical phrases. When I'm done typing a paragraph, there are often lots of unnecessary parentheses around sentences, which I remove. Sometimes I spend more keypresses editing than typing new sentences.

In the first example, I probably typed "mozilla crashes at an address not in its address space" at first, and then realized I should make it clear that the instruction pointer was what was at an address not in Mozilla's address space. In the second example, I remember that the two sentences used to be one sentence, but I don't know how to explain the error.

Erika Rice also makes strange typos:

After about an hour we got bored (or, in my Case, started to get headaches) so we grabbed some other people and went and watched "Office Space" in the lack.

(Case is a dorm at Mudd and the LAC is the Linde Activities Center.)

One Response to “Typo patterns”

  1. Jon Baron Says:

    I think you need (x)emacs. I write like you do, and I love its ability to delete words with alt-bs or alt-d. (The former may be my own configuration.) It also does sentence, paragraphs, etc., without lifting your hands from the keyboard, especially if you use a Kinesis, so that the most common keys are under your thumb.