Ask HN: reasons for frequency of mistypings on a keyboard vs. in manual writing?

2 points by 8as746fd4a5df 4y ago ↗ HN

I've observed that I rarely have any misspellings in manually written text but way more often in text typed on a keyboard. Do you experience the same? Do you know about any hypotheses why this might be the case?

2 comments

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eimrine 4y ago ↗

Definitely yes. Maybe it is because manual writing requires to be more conscious about joining the letters (google any images from request "russian cursive makes me cry sometimes" to see my point).

Another hypothesis of mine is that some non-qwerty layouts having all the most frequent symbols on the home row makes me do some typos that are indistinguishable from real words which may be visible for me maybe on tenth re-reading of my text.

navjack27 4y ago ↗

Nope. My brain is usually words ahead and my hand can't keep up and I get impatient and I make mistake after mistake when manual writing. Things I never do on my computer. The only time I type poorly is if, obviously, my hands become misaligned to the keyboard.