Tag: errors

10 Writing Nightmares

by hkatz, posted in Writing

A version of this was published on an older (now defunct) blog of mine. Enjoy! And let me know if these bring up any bad memories.

1) Misspelling the name of the person you’re writing to in an email or cover letter.

2) Producing an embarrassing typo for a word like ‘batch,’ ‘feckless,’ or ‘public.’

3) Putting the finishing touches on a 10-page essay, only to re-read the essay question and realize you didn’t answer it.

4) Repeatedly misusing ‘matriculate,’ ‘genuflect,’ ‘obfuscate,’ or any other polysyllabic word that was supposed to make you sound smart.

5) That brilliant manifesto/sonnet/one-act play you wrote last night? What it looks like the next morning.

6) Working on a 5000-word paper that’s due in less than 24 hours and based on volumes of source material you haven’t yet read.

7) Forgetting to delete something from your submitted work, such as a note you left for yourself. (“What am I even talking about?” or “Find source to back up this nonsense.”)

8) Basing the central argument of your essay on a logical fallacy or on your misreading of another person’s work.

9) Running out of ideas.

10) Submitting a piece of writing before you’ve fini

Defending even our worst ideas

by hkatz, posted in Psychology, Readings

I’m reading Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, where they try to account for why people justify errors and evil acts, deflect blame, and dismiss any evidence suggesting that they’re wrong.

The general idea is that we’re constantly trying to resolve cognitive dissonance: the presence of two conflicting ideas or concepts in our minds. The urgency with which we need to resolve cognitive dissonance increases to the extent that one of our core beliefs about ourselves is threatened.

For example, most people have the following belief about themselves: “I’m sane, decent, and competent.” (For some it could be, “I’m a peerless brilliant hero who shines an unquenchable light upon the mere mortals of this world.”)

But let’s say someone who has a good self-concept does something bad, believes in something idiotic, or identifies with something (or someone) evil or foolish. Suddenly the mind begins to question itself: “I’m a good person… but I just cheated on this test” or “I’m a smart person… but I just got suckered into spending $100 on a fad diet pill that made me gain weight” or “I worked for years and years promoting my pet scientific hypothesis… but now there’s a bunch of evidence debunking it” or “I strongly identify with and even love this awesome star football player… but now people are saying he beats his wife?”

So what does the brain do?

Many times, even without us being consciously aware of it, it minimizes the threat. We come up with justifications for cheating or lying, we double-down and defend an outworn idea, we rationalize why wasting our money or being duped was actually the smart thing, and we defend abusers, rapists and murderers even after their guilt has been proven. (People also find justification for abuse, rape, or murder that they themselves have perpetrated or turned a blind eye to as it was happening… this is the power of self-justification and our need to protect our psyche.) Our faulty memory can also swoop in and save the day, helping us gloss over details that detract from the rosy picture we have about ourselves while emphasizing the details (or inventing details) that support us.

So far the examples I’ve given are for people who have a basically good self-concept. What about people who think poorly of themselves?

Apparently the same thing happens, only in that case they’re protecting a negative self-image. If you think poorly of your intelligence, you might write off a good test score as a fluke. If you think you’re unattractive, then you dismiss someone’s flirtations by misinterpreting them or by thinking to yourself, “They like me now, but wait until they see the real me.” It’s amazing how hard the brain will work to protect core beliefs, even when they’re toxic.

The more we’re invested in something, for better or worse, the more we want to defend it and preserving our identities and what we believe is most important to our sense of self. I’ll be interested in what insights the book shares on catching yourself at these self-justifications and changing core beliefs.

Reading comprehension shortcuts

by hkatz, posted in Psychology

After a plane crash, where should the survivors be buried?

a. at sea
b. in their hometowns
c. it’s up to the loved ones, not a matter of general opinion!
d. why would a survivor need to be buried?

Did you realize before getting to choice D that the question was problematic?

If as a reader (or listener) you want a brief discussion of why it’s a good idea to concentrate on the text and avoid distractions, turn to this article.

If as a writer you realize that readers are going to skim anyway, and you want to reduce the chance that they’ll make comprehension errors, read the article for a few insights.

One important thing to realize about sentence processing is that as we’re reading a sentence our brains are already coming up with likely interpretations or meanings based on the sentence context and on our past experiences with language and the world at large. Sentence interpretation is an ongoing process – we don’t wait until we reach the end of a sentence to come up with a meaning for it. As we’re coming up with possible meanings, the sentence keeps unfolding, and some of those potential meanings have to be discarded in favor of new ones… that’s assuming we detect and process the words that contradict our favored meaning. When we’re tired or distracted, we might latch onto a likely meaning based on the general context of the sentence and ignore any word that contradicts it.

With the question on airplane survivors, many of us ignore the word ‘survivor’ in part because the phrase ‘plane crash’ at the beginning has already conjured up scenarios of mass death and no survivors, so we might skim over the word ‘survivor’ without truly processing what it means; the word ‘buried’ at the end seems to strengthen our initial interpretation of 100% fatalities and that the question must be entirely about people who have died.