Looking through your class exercise of last week I found that many of you were aiming for letter-perfect notes. You have this mixed up. I do want your final stories to be accurately spelled and punctuated, of course. But the aim in taking notes is to get down as much of what your speaker is saying in his or her own words as you can while also actually listening to them and understanding. It's a trick, as you've now seen.
The better your notes, the better your writing will be.
So it's worth practicing this skill. In addition to taking journalistic notes during lectures in other classes I have been suggesting to some of you that you start using a form of shorthand in your notes. Don't try to get every word down perfectly. It takes too long. MILITARY should become "MIL" and EXPERIENCE "EXP," for example, or GOVERNMENT "GOV" and PEOPLE "P".
There's a much-circulated little paragraph going around FACEBOOK that shows exactly how messed up words can be and yet the human mind is capable of understanding them. The moral of this exercise is that -- basically get the first and past letter or a good chunk of the beginning and you can read the word.
CNA YUO RAED TIHS???
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it
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3 comments:
This isn't the first time I've seen this, isn't it neat. Amazing how our minds work.
It's pretty interesting, but when I think I am "cool" for seeing it, I realize everyone i show this to can read it as well. Doesn't matter though, goes to show that the human mind is an amazing organ. Apparently spelling doesn't always count.
In past centuries in the US spelling of English was wildly unregulated. Try reading accounts of the founding of the country by John Smith, for example. It was considered somewhat a sign that you were uncreative if you spelled words conventionally.
Unhappily for you, however, spelling (correctly and conventionally) does always count in journalism and in this class.
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