Writing getting worse during lockdown

[Sebastian Cobb]

Prompted by a little exchange I had with Johnny, but something I'd been sort-of aware of for a while, I've found myself making some errors of what I think is called 'metathesis'[nb]I think it's this, but full disclosure I looked up the scene where Picard calls Reg Barclay 'Broccoli' and Data mentions it to ease the tenson.[/nb] (e.g. writing things like 'new' instead of 'knew').

I find this a little odd given my communication in the last 18 months will have naturally been more via text than spoken communication, and these are kind of 'soundalike' errors. I think some of it might be lack of social contact - and rushing through interactions I might've put more effort into reading, just to get them over and done with, but I don't think it's just that.

Anyway, anyone else think they might be writing worse? Is my brain just basically turning into mince now?

[greencalx]

Dunno if this is a lockdown thing or just an age thing. I've noticed over the past couple of years that as I'm typing a completely different wank to the one I was intending to write just appears. I think it's something to do with my brain and fingers working at different speeds.

(This is part of the reason why I end up editing almost all my posts. I keep trying to remember to press Preview rather than Post, but forgot. Apologies for the edit glitches that likely accompany the majority of my posts).

[bakabaka]

This is part of the reason why I end up editing almost all my posts. I keep trying to remember to press Preview rather than Post, but forgot. Apologies for the edit glitches that likely accompany the majority of my posts.

Very much the same here. My written concentration is noticeably worse this year too.

[flotemysost]

Anyway, anyone else think they might be writing worse? Is my brain just basically turning into mince now?

I'm getting this a lot when writing work emails - I type like an absolute clown at the best of times, but now I have to right-click every other word. Keep accidentally writing "be" as "b" as well, like I'm trying to be DOWN WIV DA KIDZ circa 1998. I also have to type the word "automatically" in work emails a lot, always spell it wrong and Outlook always autocorrects it to "astatically"  or "aquatically" which is very annoying.

I'm a complete dunce with numbers already - for instance, if I'm writing down a postcode starting "SW9", say, I'd be likely to write "SWN" because I'm thinking about the letter that the number 9 starts with - but it's got even worse since lockdown. Any string of numbers has to be repeated out loud, very slowly, several times, and entered with single-index-finger hunt-and-peck Dad typing. Urgh.

[Echo Valley 2-6809]

Dunno if this is a lockdown thing or just an age thing. I've noticed over the past couple of years that as I'm typing a completely different wank to the one I was intending to write just appears. I think it's something to do with my brain and fingers working at different speeds.

(This is part of the reason why I end up editing almost all my posts. I keep trying to remember to press Preview rather than Post, but forgot. Apologies for the edit glitches that likely accompany the majority of my posts).

The younger you wouldn't have put that full stop outside the parentheses.  😞

[buttgammon]

One thing I've noticed is that my vocabulary seems to be becoming ever so slightly smaller. Over the last few months, I've been doing a crazy amount of editing of my own work, and on numerous occasions, I've had to look up words because I couldn't remember what they meant, despite the fact that these are the same words I was confidently using a year or two ago.

Edited because I forgot the word 'smaller', thus proving my point!

[Cold Meat Platter]

Noticed that recently I find myself replacing the word parsnip with the word parsnip. And on some occasions parsnip.

[ASFTSN]

I've just been like this since I got a smartphone about four years ago.

[greencalx]

The younger you wouldn't have put that full stop outside the parentheses.  😞

Ha. I've always been a bit unsure about this. With multiple sentences I guess placing it outside makes no sense. With a single sentence I never know, although I think the last time I was copy edited the full stops ended up inside, so there you go. I think that's a crap English teacher thing, rather than a getting old and making unconscious word substitutions thing.

[keir]

For several years now I've often found that I've typed think instead of thing. Also some similar issues but that's the main one. It feels like it's something like muscle memory, that because I've been typing for decades now I start typing 'thing' and part of my brain that's too primitive to be using its initiative thinks "t-h-i-n... I've got this, I know how this ends, I've been doing this 'controlling the fingers' thing for you for a long time now!"

The other one main one that springs to mind is mixing their and there up when typing - I know perfectly well which is which.

[Pranet]

It seems like I am incapable of writing an email (which I do like a lot of us all day long at work) or for example a post on here without making a mistake these days. Don't know if that is due to lockdown.

I also do the their and there thing while typing. I assume that is because muscle memory takes over.

(Edit- to prove myself right the first time I posted this I put "to" instead of "do" in the sentence above.)