Why do people make grammar errors? In a general sense, errors are of two types: errors of competence and errors of performance. Errors of competence are the easy ones to explain; they’re mistakes made because one doesn’t know the correct form. I’m well familiar with these mistakes from speaking in my Spanish classes last year despite not knowing what prepositions go with what verbs and so on.
Errors of performance are a bit more interesting. Performance errors are those where one does know the correct form but still makes a mistake. For instance, I generally know the rules of English grammar. Yet when a helpful reader went through the blog archives and copy-edited for me, the list of typos and other errors he’d found were staggering. For most of the errors he found, I immediately agreed that I’d made a mistake. So why would I have screwed these things up if I knew they were errors?
Well, language happens in real time, with real-time constraints and pressures, such as having to convert from language in the mind to mouth/hand movements. That makes the task difficult, and difficult tasks are open to performance errors. Language production is difficult enough a task that immediate perfection is usually a pipe dream. The number of performance errors can be reduced if one has a chance to go back and edit, but even then some errors might slip through.
In general, spending more time on production (let’s include editing time in production time) decreases the frequency of errors. Faster production will have more performance errors, slower production will have less. This is an example of what’s known as a speed-accuracy tradeoff, and here’s a schematic of it from an MIT course:
Since language is so automatic, it might be difficult to think of changing the speed of production to affect accuracy. So to make it a little clearer, I’m willing to return to a bane of my elementary school career: Simon Says. The game is pretty simple, where you do what you’re told, but only when it’s prefaced with “Simon says X”. When commands are given out slowly, there’s almost no danger of screwing up and following a bare instruction. Low speed, high accuracy. But as it gets faster, you’re doing things sometimes before you fully process them, and that means that sometimes you’ll jump at “Jump!” before realizing that there was no “Simon says” before it. High speed, low accuracy.
Speaking or writing is much the same. If you’re going slow, you’re not going to make that many errors (unless you’re going slowly because your focus is divided or the task is difficult). If you’re going fast, you’re more likely to screw things up, even when you know the rules.
So if slowing down reduces errors, why don’t we all just slow down? As my friend Dan put it, you can speak really slowly and make (almost) no errors, but your audience will walk away before you finish your sentence. Instead, the intelligent speaker/writer aims for some reasonable combination of speed and accuracy. What’s reasonable changes due to external pressures, such as the urgency or importance of a situation. A shouted “Move!” is appropriate if a car is barrelling down on a friend; “You should take a few steps back to get out of the way,” may be more appropriate when the friend is in the path of a crawling steamroller. A quick text to a friend can have errors if it saves time (and remains comprehensible); an important email to a client is worth the extra time to reduce the errors. Problems arise when someone thinks they have more time than they actually do or they need less accuracy than they actually do.
The point of all of this is that a rational speaker or writer won’t necessarily aim for maximally grammatical production, unless the task requires it. Instead, the rational producer aims for maximizing grammaticality without spending excessive time. If there is a better way to spend one’s time and the production is good enough, a rational producer should send it off as-is. As a result, we shouldn’t think that someone making a grammar error means they don’t know the grammar, or that they don’t care. If speed is the primary concern, one has to accept some errors. If errors can’t be tolerated, one has to accept slower production.
17 comments
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May 26, 2011 at 11:43 am
Andrea Altenburg
I completely agree that accuracy tends to get worse with speed. However, there are times when deadlines are looming and speed takes over.
May 26, 2011 at 4:45 pm
The Ridger
In speech, production errors are fairly common (especially if you count either or both of hesitation markers (er, some “well”s, etc) and restarts). This, I believe, is one reason most languages have so much redundancy built into them. (Another is to make it easier for listeners to hold packets of information in memory.)
May 27, 2011 at 1:22 am
Confused
So does this mean all your previous posts containing grammar errors were typed in haste or did you simply not think your blog posts are important enough to deserve more attention to editing? Because it’s not like you’re trying to meet a deadline on your blog or turning out posts on a daily basis…
Either way, apology accepted :)
May 27, 2011 at 6:03 am
language hat
a helpful reader went through the blog archives and copy-edited for me
The mind boggles. That seems an odd use of one’s precious time on earth.
May 27, 2011 at 8:53 am
Abbie
Isn’t there a pretty huge difference between speech and writing in this area?
Speech is spontaneous, and it would be highly artificial to try and talk without making what would be “grammatical errors” if written.
Plus in writing, there are many arbitrary conventions that must be followed, that are easy to miss.
Honestly I don’t get why we allow so much variation in speech but absolutely none in writing. Oh no, you got one letter in a word wrong: YOU ARE STUPID. But if you get one phoneme in a word off, you just have an accent.
May 27, 2011 at 9:57 am
Peter J. Francis
Anyone can make errors. I just provided a free proofreading sample to a potential client and she emailed me asking what the abbreviation “fpr” meant. I had to reply that it was a typo for “for.” In editing, we are actually selling time, so the best thing would be to price ourselves by the hour. Unfortunately, clients want to know how much it’s going to cost, so the price is usually by the page. This means that there is always time pressure.
May 27, 2011 at 10:48 am
The Ridger
“Honestly I don’t get why we allow so much variation in speech but absolutely none in writing. Oh no, you got one letter in a word wrong: YOU ARE STUPID. But if you get one phoneme in a word off, you just have an accent.”
This may be why it bugs me so much when Jeopardy! penalizes a guy for saying “Muskogee” with a devoiced G (Muskokee) but shrugs and lets him win when he spells “Zhivago” with a Z instead of a ZH…
May 28, 2011 at 9:10 am
ambermartingale
I’ve known this one for a long, long time but I hardly ever practice it as usually my brain is faster than my fingers are.
Usually, bit not always. Sometimes, It’s the fact my brain is fast AND I donlt have a whole lot of time in which to get my stuff down.
I’d never seen the graph you used…that was a nice touch… .
May 28, 2011 at 9:13 am
Information every writer can likely use! « Amber Martingale's Blog
[…] https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/avoiding-grammar-mistakes-is-a-speed-accuracy-trade… […]
May 30, 2011 at 2:33 pm
CaitieCat
I do, actually, charge per hour for my work as a proofer/editor, but I do so using a set of experientially-designed standards for how many words of what kind I can manage in a reasonable hour, and I make the relevant ones available to clients when it comes up.
Excellent post, and a good point above about the difference in tolerance for spelling and phonemic errors in writing and speaking respectively.
May 31, 2011 at 6:40 pm
Mrs. Apron
Speech is more forgiving because it is a “natural” thing. You can get away with more slip-ups, and reformulations and even “there is several”s, because we’re both forward- and back-composing as we go. Writing is much historically younger than speech, and it’s an “artificial” way of communicating. By its very nature, it is composed, then sent into the future, kind of. But, we get a chance to edit before we send. We can see our errors – most of them – even with a quick proofread, before we send. Situations where less editing is possible – or preferred, such as texting, instant messaging – tolerate more errors.
But formal, written language has a set of rules that were made up externally. There’s nothing natural about reading or writing. (Just ask my caseload of dyslexic students) The spelling, the word divisions (which early writing did not have), the paragraphs, the indentations, the rules about comma splices and homonyms — none of these are “heard” in spoken language. So speech, even with its own rules, is more forgiving. In addition, your attention is on listening; you are usually not given a transcript to analyze and point out mistakes (no matter how “helpful” that is). When you’re listening to speech, you’re processing “on line”. You may make comprehension errors. If you’re reading, and you miss something, you can go back. You can glean more information since you can read and reread the words all you want. And find all the spelling and grammar mistakes (again, artificial constructs) your heart desires.
(And yes, I reread this post to proofread before I hit “post”. In spite of my command of the written language, I found mistakes. I am human.)
June 2, 2011 at 12:38 am
starlingford
Hi Gabe. I have a question, unfortunately not one really relating to this post, but’m afraid I couldn’t find a more elegant way to contact you!
This is a question I was asked by a Korean friend studying English: “Players may make words across or down. The letters should ( read / be read ) from left to right or top to bottom.” The answer is ‘read’. My friend is not clear on why this is the case, and to be honest I’m not sure either. ‘Be read’ is passive, certainly, and it switches the subject of the sentence from the letters to the reader, but neither of these seem to me to be cardinal grammatical errors. I’m also not helped by being British, and while this seems a fairly common American construction it’s nowhere near as prevalent over here. It looks to me like a stylistic, rather than strictly grammatical, problem – what am I missing?
Thanks,
Gavin
June 2, 2011 at 7:27 am
Gabe
These are some great thoughts! I agree with the distinctions you’ve all mentioned between speech and writing. I think part of why we’re more tolerant of errors in speech than in writing is that (up till recently) writing has not allowed for interactive correction. If I say something unclearly, the hearer can (usually) ask me for clarification or repetition. In writing, if there is the chance for clarification, it’s usually separated by a substantial amount of time between the request and its fulfillment. I think this might help explain why text messaging can get by with a more abbreviated and colloquial style; if there’s insufficient comprehension, your recipient can immediately ask you what you meant. (And, Ridger, that Jeopardy disparity bugs me too!)
starlingford: In the “read” form of the sentence, the sentence is in what’s known as the “middle voice” (as a midpoint between active & passive). Other middle voice sentences are things like:
(1a) This bread cuts easily
(1b) Your book is selling well
(1c) I need a meal that prepares quickly
(That last one is only borderline grammatical to me, but I said it last night while making dinner.) The middle voice, to me, goes beyond the passive to an extremely impersonal form. “The letters should be read” still makes it sound like the reader matters, and specifically like the instructions tell the reader how to read. “The letters should read” takes the reader out of it almost entirely, and makes the instructions sound like they’re telling you how to write the letters for someone else to read them. I don’t know if that’s really answering your question, but hopefully it’s at least going in the right direction.
June 4, 2011 at 9:56 am
ambermartingale
I’m surprised that I’d already commented on this blogpost.
May 15, 2012 at 1:58 pm
Jenny
The nice thing about the speed accuracy trade off is that, for the most part, people are so very willing to make the effort it takes to understand. It pertains to the impracticality, too, of knowing all the history and regional variations of all the words and phrases that are readily at your disposal conversationally.
I was reading the recent post on moot points, and thinking about how the difference between the British and American interpretations is very interesting, but as mentioned therein, most people aren’t even aware of the alternate meaning(s). There are tons of words and phrases like that and so when speaking outside our particular speech community (sometimes even within), you could be very likely to miscommunicate by saying something that is not INcorrect but has undergone a different evolution or carries a different connotation, for others. If people weren’t so well equipped and willing to understand each other, we could never be successful communicators. It’s really spectacular: that tacit listener/speaker agreement to understand and be understood in light of the confines of our knowledge and available time, not to mention our inevitable fallibility.
October 15, 2015 at 4:04 pm
Ahmad
Great Article.English is not my native language.When i speak fast the chances of grammatical errors will increase but now after reading your article i understand my weakness.
Thank you
November 22, 2019 at 1:09 pm
Speed or Accuracy: Which Makes English Oral Communication Easier? – Gabby Academy
[…] who are too focused on correct grammar face a kind of speed-accuracy tradeoff: They speak slowly to produce more accurate sentences. This makes sense—a speaker who takes time […]