Unless you start thinking about your spelling consciously, you will make a lot of those errors. Only then you would break the flow, so your brain will not allow you to do that.

The only solution is proofreading, and trying to do that as if the piece was written by someone else.

In my experience mistakes like these are made more often by native speakers than second language users. The latter have to make a conscious effort to write ‘correctly’ anyway.

Apart from this, English spelling is horrible. In most Indo-European languages the ratio between speech sounds and the different ways to write them is around 1,5 in English its about 10. (E.g. In Dutch and in English there are about 40 distinctive speech sounds (phonemes for fellow linguists): in Dutch we use about 60 different letter combinations to represent them (graphemes), in English this number is about 400.)

Hence the ‘ghoti’ = alternative spelling for ‘fish’ joke.
(f of enough, i of women and sh of nation)

To make things even harder, English has a lot of homonyms, mainly because of its diverse parentage (a lot of words of Romanic stock sound the same as words with a different meaning of Germanic stock) and because of the great vowel shift, that happened around the 17th century in English, which was never represented in the spelling. Even though most of the sounds have changed, you still use the same spelling as Shakespeare did.

So don’t worry too much about this, but try to make the effort to proofread before you post. Using bad spelling says nothing about your intelligence or the quality of your argument it just looks a bit sloppy from time to time.

As an attorney who writes a lot for a living, I can attest to the value of another set of eyes to proof read. Proofing something on your own that you have just written is never as accurate as being able to set the writing aside for a later look or have someone else proof it. Of course, the work pace created by technology, that creates the need for your blog, also makes it difficult to make the time to revise.

Second: You say
“It is almost as if I’m getting into a groove and the writing process is skipping over some stage that is normally supposed to do the processing and choose the right word.”

And you’re dead on. So much of typing is pure muscle memory. If you don’t believe me, think about typing the word “the” versus just typing the. Furthermore, note how much easier (reflexively) it is for your hand to type “there” than “their.”

So, yeah, efficiency at typing is based on less processing from the brain and more muscle memorization.

Andre at “Tools For Thought” has written recently about how increasing his typing speed has increased his global productivity. I wonder if it’s also increased the frequency in which he uses the wrong homophone. I’ll ask him – it’d be an interesting secondary consideration to think about.

The fact that someone would quit reading a blog because of a “there/their” mistake speaks more about that person than the value you offer.

I think it’s endearing when I read a smart person making a common spelling mistake! It makes me realize there is a human involved.

It’s maddening whenever someone makes a value judgement about a smart person based on a common typo, being 5 minutes late to a meeting, or failure to color within the lines, etc.

I’m glad you posted about this, but I think the unsubscriber is the one with a problem…

How sad there life must be if their offended by such things.

Of course, it helps to have someone other than yourself to proofread your work before publishing it.

Merry christmas!

Kind regards,
Kevin