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Re: Impact of typos on ESL readers?

Subject: Re: Impact of typos on ESL readers?
From: "Peter Neilson" <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 15:56:04 -0400

I sometimes wonder how ESL people are able to communicate with each other in English, given the dreadful errors that I see in material that they have written. I'm talking about two guys from separate places, like the guy from China and the guy from Greece, so that English is their only common language other than science and mathematics. But somehow they do.

Part of the problem is solved by Google Translate, because it even suggests corrections for possible errors.

The guys at http://www.antimoon.com/ probably have part of the answer, too, because they are devoted to ESL from the perspective of being ESL people themselves.

On Mon, 12 Mar 2018 14:49:49 -0400, Steven Jong <stevefjong -at- comcast -dot- net> wrote:

Typos are a fact of life. We understand they are bad both because they can erode reader confidence in the accuracy of a document and because they can cause reader confusion and misunderstanding.

Are these negative effects actually worse for readers of English as a second language (ESL)? Itâs possible for a native reader to guess the intended word from the context of the passage, and even a typo that creates an actual word can be ignored from context. But is the effect even worse for an ESL reader?

My assumption is yes, typos are even more confusing for those readers. If youâre trying to look up an unfamiliar word and itâs not even in the dictionary because itâs misspelled, it might not even be apparent what the error is. If the mistake is a real word, you might misunderstand the idea because of it.

(This seems obviously true to me. The only other language I can read even a tiny bit is French, and if there's a mistake in the original French Iâm never going to detect it. The problem also seems extensible to all languages; that is, itâs a general problem for all readers of language X as a second language, or XSL. But I ask the question in open ignorance. What do you think?)
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Impact of typos on ESL readers?: From: Steven Jong

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