Why is it that no matter how hard you work on your content, one little error will always make it through?

Writing content is a labour of love. It’s easy to pour hours and hours into a post that ends up amounting to little more than 350 words by the time it’s finished.

Of course, what people don’t see is the research, the rewriting and the slow process of cutting back your original 1,500 word opus into something that is actually a manageable read on the internet.

However, after all the checking, editing and double checking there is always one thing that gets through… typos.

It doesn’t matter that you’ve run spellcheck over it, because spellcheck can only see that ‘read’ is spelt correctly, not that you had intended to write ‘bread’.

And you can’t fully rely on your eyes because after hours of blinking over a keyboard they only see what you want them to see. The typo can be glaring and your trusted eyes just won’t spot it. After all, as the viral email said a few years back, the phaonmneel pweor of the hmuan mnid maens taht it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.

It’s genuinely infuriating, so why can’t we avoid missing these little details?

The reason…

According to a report in Wired magazine, the reason we generally can’t catch every typo is nothing to do with us being stupid. It’s actually the opposite, it’s because we’re being really smart. They spoke to psychologist Tom Stafford, who – rather amazingly – studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK. He said: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to convey meaning. It’s a very high level task.”

Because of the level of thought involved the brain starts to generalise the most simple, component parts (such as taking letters and turning them into words or making those words into comprehendible sentences) so that its free to really focus itself of the complex task of taking those sentences and using them to convey difficult ideas.

“We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases,” continued Stafford in Wired. “Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”

So, to put it another way, when you check over your own work you find yourself sub-consciously checking it for the clarity of the meaning rather than an occasional missing letter. Your brain will read an incorrect word as being absolutely fine because it knows what it’s expecting to be looking at.

Naturally, and annoyingly, the fact that your readers are coming to the content absolutely fresh is the reason they’ll completely overlook the nuance of what you were trying to convey, but immediately see the mistake in your first sentence.

This, however, is simply a fact of leif.