Blog Home For Steve Suehring

I've been writing long enough where I recognize certain patterns to my writing. I've also been writing for a sufficient length of time to recognize that the previous sentence was really awkward. That one wasn't much better. But this being a blog means that I can be less formal with the grammatically challenged sentences that I write. This soon-to-be-rambling post was originally meant to be about the common misspellings and mistypings that I make but I guess I'll see where it goes.

When writing, and especially when writing in lengthly sessions as I do when writing a book, as I am right now, I find patterns or commonalities with certain words, where I just can't seem to type them correctly. It's not so much that I'm misspelling the words because I don't know the correct spelling (I'm morally opposed to spell checkers - a subject for another post) but more so that the electrical impulses going from brain to hands to fingers are firing just out of sequence.

The sequences might be misfiring because of patterns of words that I've typed numerous times, so many times that when the fingers begin to type part of the word, the fingers end up trying to complete the original word rather than the word that the brain had intended. Almost like a muscle-memory sort of thing.

I found this to be the case yesterday while writing on loops in JavaScript. An example sentence might be: "Using a for loop to iterate through an array." The word iterate seems especially difficult for my fingers to type. I'm not sure what word they want to type, but iterate sure isn't it. The word inevitably comes out with an "n", like interate. Maybe my fingers are trying to type interact or interesting?

Another such word, and the one that prompted this post is the word more. It's such a terribly simple word to type, yet I typed it as mot. Promptly recognizing the mistake, I deleted it and proceeding to type mot again. My brain knew that I wanted to type more but I typed mot, twice!

Yet another annoying thing that my fingers seem to do is to drag the shift key, meaning that I hold the shift key down one character too long when beginning a word with an uppercase letter. I'm not sure if there are certain words where I do this, but it's annoying nonetheless. While I've been writing this post I've been thinking about this dragging of the shift key trying to determine if there are certain words where it happens. Naturally though, since I've been actively thinking about it I can't get the subconscious shift key drag to occur.

All of these traits could be muscle fatigue too, or maybe brain fatigue. The clock reading nearly 9pm means that I've been sitting here for double-digit hours again today, I think, I can't remember. Ah yes, the run-on sentence. Another sure sign of fatigue or writer laziness, not sure which.