Email: Fwd: YES!
To my ‘selected’ strange-minded friends:
If you can read the following paragraph, forward it on to your friends and the person that sent it to you with ‘yes’ in the subject line.
Yes, but no.
One. I don’t forward emails.
Two. I normally delete such immediately.
Three. I made an exception and saved it to share with you.
Can you read this? Yes!
Eonverye taht can raed tihs rsaie yuor hnad..
Only great minds can read this
This is weird, but interesting!
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it
This demonstrates the power of the human brain. Would you have imagined you could read jumbled scrambled letters?
Our eyes scan the outlines of letters. We read the “envelope” created by the outline of the word. Yes, we scan rather than read. Microsoft has a nice explanation about the Science of Word Recognition.
WORD RECOGNITION ALSO EXPLAINS WHY PEOPLE DO NOT EASILY READ LETTERS IN ALL CAPS. THERE IS NOT OUTLINE, NO ENVELOPE.
DISCLAIMERS:
- Do not do this dangerous stunt at home, I mean, on your home page or anywhere on your website.
- If you copy this, do not run spell check.
- There never was a study done at Cambridge, according to this news article about the email hoax.
Want more? Here is the jumbled text in video:
TEST QUESTION:
A test for you usability gurus…
What key design and usability principle was broken, other than jumbled letters, in the text shown on the page above?
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
LOL! Dana when I first opened your site and read the first few lines I thought you blog had been hcaekd.
LOL! !yeS The hardes part was not lpels chinkecg…
This is one of the few chain emails I’ve seen that is actually very interesting. I came across it years ago and was surprised by how easy it was to understand the scrambled text they had given. But when I subjected my blog readers to a more complicated case with bigger words, most of them had trouble with it. Probably not a good strategy, in most cases!
Hunter, sadly your comment got jumbled as spam text, and I just caught it. Bad usability on my part, for sure!
Thanks much for your input, interesting. I just read your “Deos Splnielg Rlaley Mteatr?” and did struggle to decipher. I believe the first and last letter of the word need to be the same, and our brain will overlook jumbled, misspelled text inside those letters as Glenn Allsopp noted.
As a strategy? I guess it shows us that is we want to target a word that is misspelled, maybe readers won’t notice. Agreed, not a good one, but this chain email does show a lot about the psychology of typography and reading comprehension.
can read it and only 11
http://scienceavenger.blogspot.com/2007/12/cambridge-word-scramble-study-its-fake.html
yeah i read it correctly….