According to an article recently published by Barry Ritholtz it does not matter which order the letter are placed in a word because Spelling is Irrelevant to Comprehension. He states that “In trying to make sense of the world around us, our brains have evolved to do some very odd things” and it is true that we can mix up the letters in words and still understand the context of what is being said. The limitation on this is that the first and last letter must be correctly positioned, all others can jugled exactly as desired by the writer.

Read the paragraph below, copied from Mr Ritholtz’s article:

This may in part be one of the reasons why we can skip so many spelling errors in a document, because our mind automatically interprets the error as being correct. This is not the first time that this has come to light and it may work well for a research thesis, but it has little practical use in the real world where we need to encourage better use of good spelling and grammar.

Spelling may be irrelevent to comprehension, yet the premise is flawed. We could not adopt such a method of generalised writing and expect it to be understood by all. It works well as a party trick but that is all. There are several flaws to the principle:

• The reader has to already know the word already in order for their brain to untangle the problem. If you do not know the word already (for example a youngster reading the word for the first time, or a person just learning the English language) then you will have a great deal of difficulty in understanding what is being said.
• Words that have the same characters used within them, that lead to us having to make the choice between words.
• Dyslexics that suffer from a form of word blindness are already challenged when it comes to interpreting the printed word

We may have a marvelous set of neurons in our brains, yet at the same time we should be encouraging better spelling and improvements to communications.