The Word Cloud

6 Comments

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  by Noodledoodle 8 months ago

  BEST WAY TO READ THIS IS BY STARING - NOT GIVING FOCUS - ITS FLUENT THEN !!
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  by Weens 8 months ago

  You can see how it works. 3 is representative of an E and 5 is an S, they are similar shapes and as soon as your brain realises that, the whole thing becomes easy to read.
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  by Mythwriter 8 months ago

  Similar to the point where we don't totally process the word it's so ingrained in our head. We catch the drive and form the word, moving on to the next one without really thinking about it.
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  by CJ 8 months ago

  ^^D This reminds me of an exercise I did with a bunch of Year 10s when studying 2 poems (Half Caste by John Agard and Unrelated Incidents by Tom Leonard) and looking at dialect, accent and people's perceptions of phonetic writing etc - I gave them a bunch of L33T speak texts and asked them to translate them. Contrary to popular belief, they found it really hard (L33T is different from internet lazy-speak in that it has a rigid set of rules), but it was loads of fun - they then wrote their own 'L33T' poems about their own identities, exploring use of non-conventional language. Like you say - it's amazing what our brains can do!
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  by Tony 8 months ago

  We can actually read and make sense of writing when we can see less than half the information. Have you ever tried folding a piece of printing along a line of print so that less than half of each letter can be seen when the paper is folded in two. It's still failry easy to read the sentence because our brain fills in what's missing, an if there is more than one possibility it can quickly decide which it should be from the surrounding context.
  
  It's similar with listening. If someone speaks indistinctly or in a unfamilliar accent, we may miss more than half of the words they say, but we can still undertand what they are saying from the few words we do pick out - because many of the words used are redundant. If, however, they don't use reundant words and just give one- or two-word answers to questions, we may find it impossible to interpret waht they've said. If they answer with a full sentence, there's usually no problem.
  
  We are constantly taking in vast amounts of information through our main senses, the greater proportion of which we don't actually need and our brain ignores much of it, but it knows it's there and can focus in on any particular area in an instant, should it become necessary. Amazing brains, indeed.
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  by Skylark 8 months ago

  Noodles - so true. As soon as I thought about concentrating on it, it became harder to read.
  
  Weens, yes it's quite simple when you realise what they've done - and 4 represents a capital A.
  
  Mythwriter - this is what's amazing though, isn't it? That we can achieve that level of fluency. Especially as I teach kids who are just starting out reading and you see how much they have to break down each individual word to read a sentence. It's such hard work for them but look where we end up!
  
  Ely - that sounds like a lot of fun. I've come across L33T speak in a novel I was reading a while back (Jeffrey Deaver). I don't get to do clever stuff like that my kids - very much at the stage of teaching them the correct spellings for the phonetic spellings that they usually start with as emerging writers. But sometimes, by the end of the year, we get on to language play in simple terms - riddles etc.
  
  Tony - never tried that but will now you've mentioned it. And that's so true about listening too. And it's exactly how I scraped through my French listening exams. I totally ignored the redundant words and just focused on the important words and tried to deduce the rest.