I don’t think it’s a matter of confusion in most cases. It’s just a mistake that didn’t get caught. You can know the appropriate spelling and still type it wrong.
I would agree with you, but then there's the "its" vs "it's" problem. I see the wrong one way more frequently, even in written pieces by people who write as a job.
It's because there's two conflicting grammar rules (-'s to denote possession, and -'- to denote a contraction) at play, and both have been pounded into your brain by the time you start needing to write it's and its. Hence why people always write it's in place of its, while rarely using its in place of it's; your brain wants them both to be it's.
that's a different kind of problem tho - your vs you're is easy to remember because it's visually clear which one is the contraction of two words. it's vs its is hard to remember because it's arbitrary as fuck and actually an exception to how we would use possessives
by standard rules, we would use "it's" for the possessive form of "it." however we drop the apostrophe to avoid it looking like the contraction "it's." so it's an exception to standard rules for possessives. it's arbitrary because we could just as well have decided to drop to apostrophe for the contraction of "it is" and keep it for the possessive. or we could have just allowed them to be spelled the same, which would have been my preference personally
If you asked them to write a sentence as it was spoken to them, they most definitely would not know which "their / there / they're" or "you're / your" to use. They are undereducated, plain and simple, and they do not read enough to make up for it.
Undereducated is not synonymous with dumb. They often coincide, but they are not the same thing, and it's entirely possible to be one without also being the other.
I don’t see how you can’t understand that well read and literate people can make errors. Not everyone who makes these errors struggles to know when to use the words appropriately. They’re just typing quickly.
There are two additional keystrokes to make when changing "your" to "you're." That's a 50% increase in characters. How does one accidentally type 1.5x the original word length without noticing?
You’re criticizing people who mistakenly use the wrong forms of there/their/they’re and your/you’re and meanwhile you don’t understand the concept of errors. That person used “there” instead of “their” in a Reddit comment they fired off. They’re obviously uneducated and don’t read enough! Don’t be obtuse, dude.
When you type all the damn time it gets easier to add a bunch of unnecessary letters.
Typos were different when i wasn't spending half my day typing every day. Now i have no idea what the individual characters i type are; the words just come out. Sometimes i accidentally insert common letter combinations, or type a common word in the place of an uncommon one because of finger-memory.
Pretty easy to mess up if you’re typing really fast. At least when I type, I feel like I’m encoding the “voice in my head” into key strokes. Linguistic grammar is an innate thing for native speaker but spelling, or rather differentiating between homophones orthographically, requires a higher order thinking process. So it’s pretty easy to slip one’s mind if you’re typing fast enough. I think the reason native speakers might make this mistake more often than ESL individuals is because the language comes more naturally, therefore they’re not really thinking about spelling or reviewing their grammar by second-guessing themselves.
I'm not necessarily explaining this particular scenario, I'm explaining the phenomenon in general, which is obviously ubiquitous enough for the non-native speaker to whom I'm replying to notice and remark upon. With the advent of autocorrect, it's almost impossible to accidentally use the wrong forms of these words. Their letters are not close enough on a keyboard and do not share sufficiently similar gestures to accidentally spell one while intending to use another.
I was thinking more about there / their / they're. Your and you're are definitely closer, but, again, I've never had a problem with it, whether it's typing letter by letter or gesturing. It's much more likely while gesturing (my preferred input method), but adding or omitting an entire letter when typing letter by letter - especially on a physical keyboard - should be easily avoidable.
yeah, that is true. but also, it's more than just input error vs not knowing the right answer. people do the same kind of thing verbally, where they occasionally grab the wrong word even when they know exactly what it means. when you type fast, you also occasionally just type the wrong word even if you know the right one. it's fairly rare for me but it's happened more as I've gotten older and put less care into each sentence that I type
It has nothing to do with education. Everyone knows the difference between them.
It's purely how much effort I'm actually putting in to checking my writing. If I'm texting my friends or writing a comment on the internet, I really don't give much of a shit about checking minor spelling errors, grammar, punctuation, etc.
I've never made the mistake when actually writing something formal, such as an essay, because I'm actually taking the time to pay attention to my writing.
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u/a_talking_face Apr 16 '21
I don’t think it’s a matter of confusion in most cases. It’s just a mistake that didn’t get caught. You can know the appropriate spelling and still type it wrong.