Language Arts In this typos vs. misspellings article the differences between typos and misspellings is explained.  A typo is just hitting the wrong key. Misspelling a word is usually more complicated. Read on to learn more...

Some people lump typos and misspellings together either because they are so often presented that way or because they have never had a reason to clearly differentiate them. The value of differentiating them is to come to a better understanding of one's own spelling mistakes - which can result from either - so that one can adopt appropriate plans to avoid or find and fix the mistakes.

Typos

Typos refers solely to mistakes that occur because of the way one's fingers hit the keyboard. They are mistakes that you wouldn't make if you were, say, writing the word with a pencil or spelling it aloud. They are entirely due to the circumstances of keyboarding.

And, because they are tied to the circumstances of keyboarding, while the user of a QWERTY keyboard and a Dvorak keyboard will make the same type of errors the results of the errors will look different. This is partly because, obviously with a different keyboard layout, missing a key will have different results.

But the other key reason is that the Dvorak keyboard was designed to reduce typos overall by employing a set of principles that include placing frequently used letters where they are most easily reached; allowing the right hand to dominate, since most people are right dominant; arranging letters so that they alternate between hands; and arranging the letters of digraphs so that they are not adjacent. For the rest of the article, however, we will be discussing the QWERTY keyboard, which is much more widely used.

Let's lay out the main categories of typos.

Skip a letter: If your finger doesn't come down with enough force, a letter may not get typed. This can happen more with the pinky or on the bottom row.

Double a letter: In typing several letters in close proximity, a key can be accidentally re-tapped.

Transpose letters: Some say that typing t-e-h for t-h-e is the most common spelling error. This suggests that perhaps the messages to the fingers are not keeping up with the keyboarder's thinking ahead to the next word.

Skip a space: This can happen if the space bar isn't hit firmly enough or if it needs to be hit with the non dominant hand which is less accustomed to tapping it. In addition, the appearance of a missed space can come about due to a transposition of the space with a letter - often the final letter of a word that gets tagged onto the front of the next word by the space/letter transposition. An example is aboutit instead of about it.

Miss a key: This can happen both when the keyboardist hits a neighboring key instead of the key intended and also with the keys that require a reach or that are less frequently used. So, one may mistype b and numbers like 1, 6, and 7 as well as the `, ~, ^, &, =, and +. In addition, when typing a key combination, the modifying key may be missed, resulting in spellings like aren;t instead of aren't.

Insert a key: When the fingers are flying, an extra letter that doesn't belong in the word may get introduced.

Misspellings

Misspellings occur mainly with homophones and words with similar letters. Homographs and homonyms, obviously, can't be misspelled because one of their features is that they're spelled identically. Misspellings also occur in words with unusual spellings and/or that don't follow the most common “rules” that people learn. Common categories of misspelling include:

Double instead of single and Single instead of double: Many people puzzle over the number of c's and m's in accommodate and the number of r's in occurred. Naturally, this confusion is not automatically alleviated when one is keyboarding.

Mistaken spelling of a vowel or consonant sound: When we work with a language in which /k/ can be spelled /c/, /k/, /ck/, /q/, /cq/, etc., it's not wonder that sometimes misspellings come from assigning the wrong spelling to a sound. This goes for vowels sounds as well, of course.

Mistaken spelling of a suffix (or/er; able/ible): This is like mistaking the spelling of a vowel or consonant sound, but for a slightly larger word part: bigger than a single vowel or consonant sound, but smaller than a word, these homophonic affixes can give keyboardists trouble.

Substituting a homophone: The famous errors of mistaking to, too, two; your, you're, yore; and their, they're, there are common at the keyboard. We're less likely to mistake words that name similar things but look and sound very different (for example: ewe and ram) than we are to mistake these words, which take extra cognitive energy to distinguish.

Now that you know what the types of errors are, you can take a closer look at what happens when you type and have a better shot at choosing strategies that will be effective in improving your spelling.