Some consequences of bad spelling

Last week, the New York Times had a piece about the potential monetary losses resulting from bad spelling. The author discusses how some misspelled auction items on eBay sell for very little because few bidders find them.

Reading about the frequency of spelling mistakes on the Web was no shock to me. In fact, the geek that I am, I even ran analyses [pdf] in my dissertation to see what explains whether and how often people misspell words during their online actions.

I should take a step back and explain my project. I study people’s Web-use skills. For my dissertation project, I collected data on one hundred Internet users’ online abilities. Participants were a random sample of the Mercer County (NJ) Internet population. Although these people are more educated and come from families with higher income than the average American Internet user, the sample was likely representative of the county’s Net users. (I say “likely” because it is practically impossible to know for sure, but I did as much background research as possible to establish that this is highly likely.. see my dissertation (or contact me) for more on that.)

I asked people to come to a university research setting and perform tasks online. I asked them to look for various things (political candidate information, tax forms, local events, etc.) and recorded everything they did. Many of them made spelling mistakes. This certainly slowed people down, and in some cases it also meant that they were unable to complete certain tasks.

No one asked, but since I had the data, I figured I’d look to see what explains why some people make spelling mistakes and how often. I found [pdf] that those with less education were more likely to make spelling mistakes. However, the effect of education seemed to be mediated by computer use at work and experience with the Web. Regarding number of spelling mistakes, age also seemed to matter (older people made more mistakes), but again, computer use at work and experience with the Web mediated this effect. Explaining differences in typographical errors was a bit more interesting, but I’ll leave it to you to check that out on the tables. (I included a table with information about participants’ demographics in that file in case that’s of interest.)

In a forthcoming paper, I list some more examples of common mistakes people make online such as spaces in URLs, no spaces in multiple-term search queries, and mistaken top-level domain-name extensions. More importantly, I describe the classification and coding scheme I used for coding people’s online actions. Send me a note if you’d like a copy.

As for attempts by Google and others to highlight to people that they are making a spelling mistake, it’s useful to some but not to others. My experience observing dozens of average users was that many people don’t see such hints and because results show up even in response to misspelled queries people do not realize they made a mistake and proceed.. often not to the best of sources.