The Charming Nature Of Human Writing

I was reading comments made to items I had posted in my Facebook stream and enjoyed seeing spelling and grammatical errors in some of the comments. It is not uncommon for me to make such errors, as well. I was surprised to experience such appreciation of these mistakes since I am somewhat of a careful editor.

In a world where text communications are scrutinized and corrected by machines, it has become refreshing for me to find signs of humanity in imperfect writings. The products of high technology will increasingly intercept and erase these soon to be archaic signs of biological fallibility.

Perhaps the future world of sterile, computer-perfected missives might be improved by error-algorithms? Such scripts would need to be moderately sophisticated not to make too many mistakes or absurd misspellings. Letting by an occasional your for you’re or misuse of lay and lie might suffice to add a human flavor to a machine-corrected writing. This technique may already be employed in any one of the many Turing Test bots.

Current programs seem particularly clumsy with usage rules and I am not even aware of a program that tries to correct style errors – machine language translation can be funny. As computers start to get these things right, I suspect I will miss the charm of the vintage machines, too.

Update 07.23.2009: Xiomara Z. Mujer has translated this blog post to Spanish and posted the translation here – special thanks to Xiomara!

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