Thanks to all readers who write in to correct my frequent typos.
You will have to forgive me for speaking blogistani.

For years, I taught spelling, grammar, punctuation, and the rest. I corrected fine distinctions of meaning. I forced captive student to rewrite words.

But it turned out that I was more captive than they were.

Blogistani is now my native language and I speak it like any transplant, picking up the rules as I go along.

One rule of blogs is that corrections should appear as corrections.

But for minor matters of grammar and spelling, that would create a fine mess and be more confusing than useful most of the time. So I simply rewrite mistakes as I spot them. And the same goes for changes in style, or additions of non-essential detail (although I’ll make note of an update and time, if the information is more critical).

Of course, for any important details, or for citations or quotes where other people are affected, or for breaking news, I cross out and insert an apology as well.

There are also some physical reasons.

The charm of blogistani is that you can speak it as you go along and so I rarely reread my posts before posting. I like the feeling of writing on the run. That has its upside – I catch all those fleeting thoughts. But it also has its down side – typos.

Another thing. I rarely wear my glasses and sometimes don’t see errors until I (or you) reread a post.
This isn’t vanity (since I lead a reclusive life). It’s my fixation with the thesis that crutches make muscles weaker. And glasses are crutches. I got that notion into my head as a child when I read a copy of the “Bates’ Method,” which is a system of natural corrective exercises for myopia. Whether they work or not, I don’t know. But after a lifetime of squinting at piano scores, exam papers, manuscripts, and pixels, in all sorts of light, without my glasses, my eyesight hasn’t got any worse than the original prescription. I see this as something of a vindication of a pet crank of mine, and naturally I hang on to it by going without my glasses.

The third reason for my blindness is my way of reading. I either read at lightning speed, absorbing big chunks of reading matter at a glance….or I take forever to get through a paragraph.

Both styles of reading suit me and have their uses.

I use the slow method for philosophy and fiction.

I use the fast method for getting through the news on the net.

Fast reading is also partly a bad habit left over from exams in India, where we had to extract the salient facts from reams of overwritten material. My eye sometimes doesn’t actually see the individual phrases but gets the information out of the writing holistically. People who sight-read music a lot use the same technique. They can get through and synthesize a lot of information this way very fast. But it also means they need to proof their writing more than most people.

I’ll post more on this subject, because I’ve thought about it a lot over the years – how we absorb information, how we remember it and reuse it, how we process our sensory input.

And I come at this not from the point of view of a specialist in cognitive research (although I’m familiar with some of it), but from the point of view of pedagogical theory….