26 Notice Your Mistakes

“Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.”

George Bernard Shaw

How do you feel when you get an email that has a spelling mistake in it?

I know when I get one, I feel like the person sending me the email has written it in a rush. It makes me think they don't see it as important because they haven't checked it through properly.

The thing is, I know I send emails with mistakes in them as well. The problem isn't always that we haven't checked it through, it's that we can't see the mistakes.

You may very well have seen this test before, but if not, try reading through the next paragraph:

It's incredible really, but as you've just read, it's because our mind reads the whole word and not every letter. Give it to a five or six-year-old to read and they'd probably have the same reaction as my spellcheck had: total meltdown. When children are starting to read, they are reading each letter in the word, so to them it looks like complete gobbledygook. This is because the word patterns in their brains have not yet become rigid.

Our word patterns are so ...

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