Learn to touch-type. Learn to type with ten fingers.
Computer programs and websites to do this abound. If you find one that’s horrible to use, find another. But persist until you do.
I am appalled at how many people I know who use computers typing for hours a day, and never learned how to drive a keyboard. They insist they’re just as fast as they would be touch-typing (they’re not), and then complain of sore fingers from doing weird stuff to adapt to their inability to type properly.
Anyone reading this site uses computers enough they should know how to type. I would estimate (based on my geeky friends I’ve seen at a keyboard) less than 20% of you can touch-type properly.
Set up your desk, chair etc per the handy how-to-avoid-RSI diagrams that one can hardly get away from in any setting. Then LEARN HOW TO TYPE. And don’t make an excuse for why you’re a special snowflake who doesn’t need to.
By the way, when I discovered IRC big time (1996), it took my speed from 60wpm to 90wpm. Complete sentences, they’re your friend.
My daughter is three and a half. She is already more skilled with the computers at nursery than the staff are. (Can get from the CBeebies games to watching Octonauts on the iPlayer in the blink of an eye!) I’m going to make sure she learns to type properly as soon as possible after she learns to read, dexterity allowing.
I’ve always been amused by the “magic feather” nature of my typing.
I don’t touch type. I ask my brain about this, and it reports without hesitation that I don’t touch type. Honest. Never have.
That said, I am perfectly capable of typing at a respectable clip without looking at the keyboard, with my fingers hovering more-or-less above the home row. I get screwy when I go after unusual punctuation keys or numbers, but when it comes to letters and commas and so forth, it works fine.
For several years, this only worked when I didn’t notice it was working… that is, when I became sufficiently absorbed in what I was doing that I just typed. This became clear to me when a coworker commented “Oh, hey, I didn’t know you could touch-type” and suddenly I couldn’t.
It has become less fragile since then… I am typing this right now without looking at the keyboard, for example.
But my brain remains fairly certain that I don’t touchtype.
I learned only a little while ago that I don’t type, I dance. Words are regular, common movements… maybe like the finger movements of an incantation. Kinda cool.
I was in the same state: I could type without looking as long as I didn’t think about it. I wanted to get where I could type while looking at the screen or copy from a piece of paper. I rearranged the keycaps on my keyboard in alphabetical order so that if I looked down I would mess up. After a painful couple of weeks (especially with complex passwords) I had convinced my brain that I didn’t need to be looking down to type.
My typing is not as good as yours, though, because I don’t really use all my fingers. I type plenty fast, but I overuse my inner fingers and move my hands more than you’re supposed to.
I would also like to tentatively suggest an optimized keyboard layout such as Dvorak or Colemak, since the inconvenience is minimal if you’re starting from scratch, and there seems to be anecdotal evidence that they improve comfort and lessen RSIs in the long run, but if fretting about what layout to use causes you to procrastinate for even one day on learning to type already then you should forget I said anything.
Getting people to learn to type will be, however :-D
HOW THE HELL DO 80% OF THE COMPUTER-MAINLINING GEEKS I KNOW NOT KNOW HOW TO TYPE. HOW DO THEY NOT KNOW HOW TO USE THEIR PRIMARY MODE OF HUMAN INTERACTION. Figuring that out will be a study in human cognitive biases, for sure.
Yeah, there’s a reason i didn’t mention Dvorak or whatever ;-) So as not to put another “thing to do first” in the way. I know in person nobody at all who actually uses Dvorak. I can’t think of any Dvorak users amongst online friends I haven’t seen typing. (Perhaps there are some and they’ve just never said anything.)
I use Dvorak. It’s no faster and no more accurate, but it does tire out your fingers a whole lot less, and just typing one sentence in Dvorak will enable you to see why. I switched to Dvorak after a bout of RSI, and the RSI never came back.
If you work someplace that allows you basic administrator privileges, or just has a friendly systems administrator, it isn’t very difficult to change the keyboard layout in Windows. It can be set on a software level, or you could just bring a Dvorak keyboard in to work.
Unfortunately, half the jobs I’ve had wouldn’t allow this, so it’s not a guaranteed solution. And the software switch is only useful if you have a cover you can throw over the existing keyboard, or can touch-type sufficiently well.
Still, don’t think being employed eliminates the Dvorak option. I looked in to it just recently to make sure that learning Dvorak wouldn’t give me too much of a headache at work :)
That’s actually something I’ve never seen pointed out about Dvorak—every comparison seems to be about the speed relative to QWERTY. (Oh, the Wikipedia article mentions it in the first paragraph.)
Colemak user here. It didn’t magically improve my typing speed as I hoped, top speed is 70 wpm and used to be the same with qwerty. I’m pretty sure it’s more ergonomic to type with than qwerty, and I do have some wrist problems, so I’m going to stick with it.
I don’t think non-mainstream layouts are something people should feel obliged to adopt unless they are having wrist problems. Beyond the ergonomics, it’s mostly a weird thing to learn for fun.
Didn’t like Dvorak because it makes you type ‘ls’ with your right pinky, and I type ‘ls’ a lot on unixlike command line shells.
It occurs to me that ‘l’ is also ‘move right’ in vim. I think I find my rightmost three fingers hovering on the top row when I move about for this reason. Wonder if I should try to remap those movement keys...
The vim movement keys actually work surprisingly well in Dvorak. Up/Down are next to each other on your left hand, right/left are on the appropriate sides of your right hand.
The nice thing about keyboard layouts, now that we have reprogrammable computers, is that there’s little need to have holy wars over them. Having more people use the same layout is mostly inconsequential to a single user of the layout. It’s very different for operating systems, programming languages and programs, where a lack of users means a lack of support and a slow slide into obscurity and eventual unusability.
Eliezer uses Dvorak, or at least used to four years ago:
I can personally testify that Dvorak seems to be much easier on the fingers than Qwerty—but this is not surprising, since if Dvorak really were inferior to Qwerty, it would soon cease to exist. (Yes, I am familiar with the controversy in this area—bear in mind that this is a politically charged topic since it has been used to make accusations of market failure. Nonetheless, my fingers now sweat less, my hands feel less tired, my carpal tunnel syndrome went away, and none of this is surprising because I can feel my fingers traveling shorter distances.)
Except I’ve been typing for a living for 13 years on QWERTY and never had carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s not clear to me that it has anything to do with keyboard layout.
Reasons one may not have carpal tunnel syndrome may be:
1) independent of their keyboard layout, e.g. their carpal tunnels are very resilient, or they may not type enough to injure them;
2) dependent on the keyboard layout, e.g. for the typing one does one layout may be “efficient” enough not to trigger the syndrome.
The observation that one never had CTS doesn’t separate the two hypotheses (i.e., you can’t tell if you never had carpal tunnel because of 1 or 2).
My personal experience, as well as reports from others (e.g. Eliezer), is that typing on QWERTY did cause CTS, and after switching to Dvorak (for many years now), without any other visible change in typing (quantity or kind) the symptoms disappeared.
From this evidence, the conclusion is quite clear that Dvorak is better for CTS than QWERTY. To be unclear about it you’d need to also have observations of people that had CTS with Dvorak but not with QWERTY. (However, it’s also clear that QWERTY is enough for some people, and that you’re likely in that category.)
(Of course, the conclusion is “clear”, as I said, based on the evidence cited. It’s not a lot of evidence, so it doesn’t mean that the conclusion is definite in general. I just pointed out that you have more evidence than your personal experience that you’re ignoring.)
(ETA: Also, it appears that you don’t quite need to worry about it. Similarly, I picked Dvorak when I had CTS, my CTS went away, and I don’t need to worry about layouts better than Dvorak. That doesn’t mean I’m not clear about Dvorak being less efficient than other layouts.)
To be unclear about it you’d need to also have observations of people that had CTS with Dvorak but not with QWERTY. (However, it’s also clear that QWERTY is enough for some people, and that you’re likely in that category.)
Incorrect. As QWERTY is the standard, most people who have no problem with QWERTY don’t switch.
Therefore, people for whom QWERTY is more efficient than Dvorak are highly unlikely to ever use Dvorak enough to develop problems (such as CTS). If, say, 10% of the population was better off with Dvorak and 90% was better off with QWERTY, you still wouldn’t expect to see people developing CTS with Dvorak, then going to QWERTY, because most people start with QWERTY.
I’m not saying that QWERTY is better for anyone than Dvorak (personally the only reason I stopped using Dvorak was because I couldn’t work out how to change the commands for ctrl-c, ctrl-x, ctrl-z, ctrl-s etc. to be in the same positions, rather than spread all over the keyboard) merely that it’s a perfectly reasonable possibility given the evidence presented.
It’s easy to learn. You can still retain qwerty proficiency. It does feel nicer for typing English. It doesn’t help programming. It’s annoying to use multiple/public computers.
There are quite a few layouts that may be better than Dvorak. But probably not by enough to justify the extra effort of choosing one.
I first learned how to touch type on Dvorak, but switched to qwerty when I went to college so I wouldn’t have issues using other computers. I found that I could not maintain proficiency with both layouts. One skill just clobbered the other.
Maybe that’s true once you try to get extremely fast with both.
Since elementary school typing class, I’ve been 80+ wpm qwerty.
I only learned and used dvorak up to about 50-60 wpm. Perhaps I never could have built maximum competence in both. I definitely noticed some mode-switching overhead.
But probably not by enough to justify the extra effort of choosing one.
I disagree. (And am biased as it gets.)
Qwerty is really pretty bad. But looking out for the available once might make a difference in experienced typeability.
The network effect of keyboards is marginally. Some are preinstalled in your favorite OS, some are not. But otherwise you end up with about the same effort for relearning and explaining to other computer users why yours works different, that you can really invest a few hours to first look up which layout suits you the most.
Dvorak is probably worth learning. I’m saying that (except if you spend most of your time typing non-English text, e.g. some programming language that has much more typing time than thinking time), it’s probably not worth finding a more optimal layout than Dvorak.
In fact, if you have examples of the types of text you most often type, you can find a nonstandard layout using computer optimization, which is what I was thinking of.
My rough view is that for typical English text, the efficiencies are:
qwerty: 85%
dvorak: 97%
(all other layouts): at most 100%
So it’s better to just learn Dvorak now than to choose something that has more implementation effort than choosing the layout from a menu (iphone, windows, mac, and unix will probably all have a menu that includes a dvorak mode, but not some more esoteric 99% efficient layout for your workload).
The efficiency numbers I give are in terms of actual trained speed and accuracy. In fact, by metrics like “finger miles”, Dvorak is dramatically more efficient than qwerty. That’s not what I optimize, though. I am skeptical that RSI risk scales mainly with “daily finger miles” (I had pretty severe wrist/shoulder RSI for over a year in the past).
This has made me wonder why I don’t use Dvorak myself. I think it’s mostly because I didn’t learn the full keyset I use for programming. And I would probably prefer one of the more-like-qwerty punctuation layouts (that mainly rearranges letter keys), but I don’t want to decide …
I’m guilty of not really following my own advice, so I welcome a refutation :)
I try my best, but I also am very biased and probably not an expert.
The main effort in switching layouts is a fixed re:training time, and then some minor hassles when interfacing with other people. It is not the time to install the new driver!
(I usually regroup the keys on my keyboards, but thats also a fixed time per keyboard bought and some low level fun.)
There is no research I am aware of that confirms the RSI/finger movement connection. All pleasure derived from my Layout of choice is purely subjective.
The point I tried to make is that it pays to choose well before deciding to spend the effort for training a new layout. Take a few hours to reach a somewhat reasonable decision and then go about it, instead of just following a subcultural trend.
I think you underestimate the possible benefits gained from a better designed keyboard. There is a lot of space at the top.
What makes me like Neo tremendously besides the optimization are the additional layers. Pay attention to the 3rd layer in the overview. All brackets are nicely available in the center field.I would like to see that tacked onto any other layout one might choose.
(I am also disappointed that professional researchers into work ergonomy did not attack this topic on their own. The layouts I checked out seem to be fan projects. And with current technology it is almost trivial to calculate a good one at home.)
And being somewhat of a language buff I can type all latin-based languages natively from my keyboard. Without installing anything extra or switching layouts multiple times. That might not be too important for all-english writers, but for me that means some benefit with my 3rd language and possible later ones.
I would expect that someone interested in the topic is not immediately aware of the possibilities offered.
Actually before relearning I calculated the expected benefits and came out with what economists call a black 0 meaning some minor benefits. It is more valuable to retrain to another layout when young, and when you expect to write a lot of text over your lifetime. Programmers might be on the edge of not benefiting too much from it. But I find the experience of having to relearn highly interesting in itself. It helps in empathizing with computer newbies.
If you decide to go for a new layout, give at least Colemak a good thorough look. If not, no harm done.
Disclaimer: I use NEO since 2006, after a brief try with dvorak]
I agree that subjective pleasure with your choices is very important.
I just remembered another reason I chose to stay qwerty—emacs keybindings and video games (although I’m video game abstinent for the past few months). The default letters-as-commands mappings would have to be changed or positionally relearned for each such application I’m familiar with (similar: ctrl-z x c v in windows). Overall I didn’t feel like investing the effort to resolve the annoyance, but I guess I wish now that I had made the investment; I’d probably enjoy the result as you do.
The effort of installing a new layout isn’t much, you’re right (unless you hop computers often). It just might be if you use especially limited devices (does the iphone/ipad keyboard even support arbitrary layouts?) that you sometimes need to qwerty anyway.
The NEO developergroup payed attention to many of those. They also collected common sets of two or three letters from common applications. So the Smiley becomes just one roll over three buttons. I probably reap some benefits from that once I get back into Lateχ. In general I like to use tools that are optimized over my current horizon and can surprise me with thinks already put in way after I started to use them.
I guess I wish now that I had made the investment
You can make the investment at any time you choose. Once you did the calculation changes (thanks to sunken cost) but before that its a matter of finding a convenient time space. Like when one is sick at home, or in holidays.
Iphone/ipad does not have Colemak or generic support for different layouts. Not sure about Dvorak.
I know at least 2 Dvorak users, 1 Colemak user, and 1 NEO user personally, and a few who are interested to learn.
For anyone interested in switching layouts: skip Dvorak and go to one of the newer computer optimized layouts right away. I found it an interesting experience to have to re:learn how to type.
The author uses dynamic programming to calculate the various costs involved with typing (like finger movement, distance from home row, etc) and uses that to generate better layouts via simulated annealing. I thought it was a nicely quantitative take on a subject that is usually so subjective.
Although he had the right idea, I think this author’s analysis was rather poor. I don’t think he did a good job of modelling the importance of different kinds of typing strains. I like Colemak a lot better.
They insist they’re just as fast as they would be touch-typing (they’re not)
I would estimate (based on my geeky friends I’ve seen at a keyboard) less than 20% of you can touch-type properly
This seems like dogmatic adherence to tradition.
Is there actually evidence that the traditional method of touch typing, where each finger is assigned a keyboard column and returns to the “Home Row” after striking a key, is at all faster, more efficient, or ergonomically sound than just typing intuitively?
I ask because I type intuitively with ten fingers. I know where all the keys are, and I don’t see the need to return each finger to the home row after every single keystroke, which seems inefficient. If I type a common sequence like “er” or “th,” I do it with a single flick of the hand, not four separate ones.
Also, I cover a much larger portion of the keyboard with my right hand than my left, because it’s stronger and more natural for me than assigning each finger the exact same amount of keyboard real estate.
If I type a common sequence like “er” or “th,” I do it with a single flick of the hand, not four separate ones.
Skilled touch typists certainly don’t make four separate motions to type “er” or “th”. Keyboards are specifically designed to accept multiple keys being pressed at the same time, because a skilled typist naturally presses the next key before they have finished the motion for the previous one. Nearly all keyboards will accept two simultaneous keypresses, with higher-quality ones accepting 3, 4, or arbitrary numbers of simultaneous keystrokes.
To be specific, typing “er” involves lifting my hand upwards, hitting “e” and “r” with my middle and pointer fingers in quick succession, and then dropping my hand back down. Typing “th” involves lifting my left hand at the same time as I shift my right hand slightly leftwards, and striking the “t” slightly before striking the “h” (though I often transpose the two actions and end up typing “hte” or “htat”).
If I type a common sequence like “er” or “th,” I do it with a single flick of the hand, not four separate ones.
You do “th” with one hand? I suggest that is less efficient than coordinating two shorter moves by the respective nearest fingers. “rt”, of course, is a hand flick. Perhaps my vim navigation has biased me. “h” totally belongs to my right trigger finger and moving my left middle finger all the way over to the ‘t’ so that a left hand flick can pull of a ‘th’ rapidly sounds like far too far out of the way.
Is there actually evidence that the traditional method of touch typing, where each finger is assigned a keyboard column and returns to the “Home Row” after striking a key, is at all faster, more efficient, or ergonomically sound than just typing intuitively?
I don’t know of any studies (although they probably exist), but (a) touch typists I know are much faster than touch typists I don’t know, and (b) the world’s fastest typists are, as far as I know, all touch typists. Sean Wrona, currently the world’s fastest typist, uses touch typing. So did Barbara Blackburn, the previous world’s fastest typist.
I definitely agree, but that’s party because my right hand rests at an odd angle. I’ll sometimes lose the home-row on it, but it gives me much faster access to Home/End keys, as well as the numpad and the mouse, and usually those benefits far outweigh the advantages of a “traditional” typing pose.
The problem with tradition is that it’s generally only applicable to a specific set of circumstances :)
Until about a year ago I couldn’t touch-type either. I fixed it painlessly by removing my keyboard’s keys and reinserting them in random positions.
This would only help you if you already know more-or-less where the keys are, but you’re too lazy to go a bit further and type without looking at the keyboard. It works because looking at the keyboard no longer helps, and you have to keep your fingers on the home keys to keep your sense of where the keys are.
If you manage to memorize the new letter arrangement, just rerearrange.
I find typing an entire sentence with my eyes closed is one of the best ways to develop good typing skills. It’s really weird feeling myself correcting typos before I can svn see them. It also penalizes errors a lot more, and thus encourages a “get it right the first time” style of typing, instead of my usual “make mistakes and fix them” style.
(Typed the preceding paragraph blind. “svn” is a typo for “even”, and I was only aware I screwed it up ^^)
It’s also a fun “party trick”—I like to creep out co-workers by turning to listen to them and continuing to type :)
They insist they’re just as fast as they would be touch-typing (they’re not)
One can get fast enough using intuitive typing that I would imagine that the main bottleneck would be the need to pause and think of what you’re writing, not the speed of your fingers.
Although it’s frustratingly slow, I seem to have the impression that writing by hand sometimes produces higher quality (unedited) text, because you have more time to think about what you’re writing. Of course, because it still isn’t good enough without the edits you can really only do with a word processor, overall it’s still an inferior choice.
Depends. If I could type as fast as I talk, I would write more and better.
(I write, speak and think pretty much identically. This is necessary to being a certain species of good writer.)
Typing “cat>>tmp.txt” gives me a terminal where I can only add lines, not remove them. This gets me writing a first draft brain-dump pretty efficiently—to the point where I plug in a larger keyboard, because this netbook keyboard is too slow. (Need a Model M.)
I’ve seen many authors say that writing in a medium where you can’t go back and edit as you’re writing gives better results, as you train your brain to get stuff right the first time. Also, typing a second draft completely afresh (rather than word-processing the first draft) gives good results. These are, of course, in the class of techniques for writers to try applying to see what works for them personally.
Back in the olden days, before this “web” rubbish, my friends and I would write multi-page first draft letters to each other, rambling on about whatever rubbish (generally indie music).
Here is good touch typing site, which doesn’t force you to type stupid rows of random characters but adapts to your current efficiency per key. https://www.keybr.com/
Hm, I seem to be another exception and a new kind of exception.
I had a typing class (3rd grade) and used software for learning typing (Mavis Beacon on a Mac). Neither helped me to touch type, but I still learned to use all fingers when typing, and today I can do ~90 WPM—although that’s brain-to-typed letters; I go slower for transcribing a given text. I also use an ergonomic split keyboard that’s much harder to use one-handed.
And the way that I learned was through gradual adjustment after needing to type a lot. Basically, I started out as a hunt/pecker (after trying Mavis and the classroom) and then made it a habit to, every once in a while, type a letter with a nearby finger instead of the forefinger. Over time, my hands moved less and less until they just settled on the method that is touch-typing, depending on what you count as T-T, since I have some quirks.
For example, I usually do capital letters with one hand (pinky on shift, one of the remaining other fingers for the letter) rather than using the opposite hand to shift.
And I actually prefer using the keyboard when possible: for a while I was on a quest to see how long I could go without using the mouse, even so far as to add and edit a firefox extension that let me browse the web with one hand on the keyboard. (I took one of the existing ones and changed it so it only used keys on the left side of the keyboard.)
At an earlier job we moved buildings, breaking down and setting up our workspaces. I had been working away as usual for over a week thereafter before realizing I had neglected to actually plug in the mouse.
Yes, I’m familiar with that comment, as I was before you made your first reply, and your point still isn’t any clearer. Why don’t you try again, and this time, say it explicitly, so I can either appreciate your insight, see your error, or confirm your rudeness.
My point is simply that what you are doing is not touch typing; if you transcribe slower than you can type from your brain then you are not touch typing. People who touch type find transcription a lot faster since they do not need to think at all. I find your narrative an elaborate excuse for not simply learning to type properly.
Okay, thanks for stating your point—this should have been your first comment.
Now, could you provide a source for your claim about “people who touch type find transcribing easier”? Your reasoning doesn’t make sense: when I transcribe, having to learn what I’m supposed to type is the bottleneck, which is why typing what’s already in my head is faster for me—I skip the stage of reading. I also don’t think about each individual letter as you seem to be implying, and I type as fast as the OP touch-typist claims.
I can even type fast enough to transcribe people talking. (The accuracy isn’t good, but it’s high enough to reconstruct it afterward.)
I use 10 fingers, I base 8 of them on the home row, I type a touch-typing speeds, I use a keyboard optmized for touch typing, I use the keyboard in preference to the mouse; what exactly would “learning to type” include, and how would it be an improvement?
Maybe I misunderstood you; I guess I leapt to the conclusion that when transcribing your eyes moved between the source and the keyboard. If that were the case then “learning to type” would mean learning to type without ever looking at the keys. It sounds like you do that. If you didn’t do that, then its a safe bet that while your 90 WPM is “good enough” you could almost certainly transcribe faster if you could keep your eyes on the source all the time.
I don’t ever look at the keyboard when transcribing, or typing in general (except maybe on the occasional symbol). The slowdown in transcription is not from having to look back at the keyboard.
I can concur with the reporter’s comments in that transcribing is faster for me (as a touch-typist), and more accurate. I can disconnect my brain when transcribing and just let the text flow from my visual center straight to my fingers. When transcribing properly you’re not actually “reading”—I, at least, retain very little of texts that I transcribe.
This is why learning to speed read is so difficult for me.
If I look at a word I’ve read and subvocalized it. I can’t not read a word that I look at. I can try to ignore parsing full sentences and their relation to each other, with limited success, but not at the scale of individual words or letters.
And how does this not make you a special snowflake?
He was partially melted with an itsy bitsy soldering iron as opposed to having a wedge cut out with an itsy bitsy scalpel. Less neat but also smoother.
From this, it sounds like I was lucky that I took a typing class in in high school (mostly because I wanted some easy credits). Do most schools not offer this?
The typing class I took was by far the best, most useful class I had in four years of high school—and the only one where I could not have learned the material better by simply being left alone in a quiet room with the textbook. (Although being left alone with a computer and a decent learn-to-type program would probably have done just as well; but this was 1994 and my school had typewriters, not computers, so the teacher was actually useful.)
I think it’s pretty common. I had two years of it in middle school. It never really stuck though; all my attempts to learn proper home-row style touch typing were a complete wash. After about six or seven years of computer use, I realized that I had absorbed the locations of the keys in my muscle memory, and was able to touch type in spite of not using proper form; as Kaj Sotala says, the bottleneck is thinking about what to type, not typing it.
I’m not sure how many people are equally ill served by the various teaching programs that are available, but I’d be surprised if I’m the only one.
Mine has an assessment in it in early high school, but it’s not a main part of the course and you only learn it if you take applications. (As opposed to Multimedia, Programming or Hardware.)
Anyway, I got from about 15WPM to 25WPM at school. Then I got my own computer at home, and in two weeks I was up to 60WPM just from using it so much.
Mine never did (1980-84). I learnt at 23 after I’d been editing a fanzine for a few years, something which required me to type a lot. And learning to type with ten fingers instead of two took me from 15-20wpm to 40wpm within a few weeks. SO WORTH IT.
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a few times everyday, using the ‘proper’ finger positions. In a week or two, I was touchtyping.
Some months ago I injured my left hand and had to type using my right hand only (I switched to the right-hand dvorak keyboard layout). I did not have much patience for the above practice sentences; I just practiced them a few times then jumped right into actual typing. A couple of weeks later I was touch typing comfortably with only my right hand.
The thing that really worked for me was that I was writing a fanzine at the time (1990), so had plenty of stuff I had to type. So I learnt all the keys, was at 20wpm which was slightly less than the 23-25wpm I could do two-fingered, and went ahead typing actual stuff I had to type properly with ten fingers.
tl;dr Have actual stuff to type, use your new skill.
I tend to type with just one hand a lot of the time. I’ve trained with touch-typing software, but I never managed to learn to type all that quickly. My “one-and-a-half-handed” typing is about as fast as I’ve ever gotten when trying to touch type properly, so I haven’t bothered to try to practice more. (I think I do about 30 WPM.)
My father, on the other hand, is a 62-year-old engineering professor who still can’t type with more than two fingers. When he tried to get tech support from a chat room once, the support guy kept asking if he was still there.
I never had the self-discipline to stop looking down at the keyboard. I eventually forced myself to learn to touch-type by switching to Dvorak. I still have to look at the keys to type numbers (which are the same under both layouts); I should probably paint over those keys with whiteout or something.
I never learned how to formally touch type. I seemed more adept than what seems average, based on your impression. As a programmer by trade, my father also knew the importance of me learning how to type, so when I was around ten or eleven he set out in getting me on board with a typing program. I thought it was boring and didn’t last very long. By the time I got to the end of high school, what with me having learned touch-typing through brute force from my habit of writing essays for fun in my spare time, let alone for homework, I could type between forty and fifty wpm.
Now, five years later, I can type between fifty and sixty wpm. Since then, my father than others remark they’re impressed by how fast I can type. People seem to think I know about computers, because I must use them lots, because I type fast. However, I only know how to type. I’ve tested my ability multiple times by closing my eyes while I type, and I think I’m able to type just as fast. Typing with my eyes closed produces an error rate that’s as good as when I have my eyes open, so that’s seems a valid test that I’m touch-typing for real, at all. I think my biggest problem now is my error rate. I think my biggest problem now might be my error rate, and making mistakes. Do you think it would be worth it for me to by training with a formal touch-typing training program or game now, or am I good? For the record, I don’t think I’ll end up in a career where build software, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I spend most of my time on the job behind a keyboard.
I might be the snowflake here.
Every time I tried to learn 10 finger I got bored and broke off. But I developed a reasonably high speed anyway. A few years ago I started using Neo which is just awesome, but optimized for German. (Still it has some features Colemak and Dvorak are missing, maybe someone likes to dig into this and prepare an engl. version.)
After that I basically had to relearn typing, and did so the same way. My current type speed maxes somewhere at 400CPM which is way more than I actually need.
The OP has a great point. Learn your tools! In case of the computer that includes to use keyboard shortcuts and optimize commonly done activities.
Please, please, please, I beg you:
Learn to touch-type. Learn to type with ten fingers.
Computer programs and websites to do this abound. If you find one that’s horrible to use, find another. But persist until you do.
I am appalled at how many people I know who use computers typing for hours a day, and never learned how to drive a keyboard. They insist they’re just as fast as they would be touch-typing (they’re not), and then complain of sore fingers from doing weird stuff to adapt to their inability to type properly.
Anyone reading this site uses computers enough they should know how to type. I would estimate (based on my geeky friends I’ve seen at a keyboard) less than 20% of you can touch-type properly.
Set up your desk, chair etc per the handy how-to-avoid-RSI diagrams that one can hardly get away from in any setting. Then LEARN HOW TO TYPE. And don’t make an excuse for why you’re a special snowflake who doesn’t need to.
By the way, when I discovered IRC big time (1996), it took my speed from 60wpm to 90wpm. Complete sentences, they’re your friend.
My daughter is three and a half. She is already more skilled with the computers at nursery than the staff are. (Can get from the CBeebies games to watching Octonauts on the iPlayer in the blink of an eye!) I’m going to make sure she learns to type properly as soon as possible after she learns to read, dexterity allowing.
I’ve always been amused by the “magic feather” nature of my typing.
I don’t touch type. I ask my brain about this, and it reports without hesitation that I don’t touch type. Honest. Never have.
That said, I am perfectly capable of typing at a respectable clip without looking at the keyboard, with my fingers hovering more-or-less above the home row. I get screwy when I go after unusual punctuation keys or numbers, but when it comes to letters and commas and so forth, it works fine.
For several years, this only worked when I didn’t notice it was working… that is, when I became sufficiently absorbed in what I was doing that I just typed. This became clear to me when a coworker commented “Oh, hey, I didn’t know you could touch-type” and suddenly I couldn’t.
It has become less fragile since then… I am typing this right now without looking at the keyboard, for example.
But my brain remains fairly certain that I don’t touchtype.
(shrug)
I learned only a little while ago that I don’t type, I dance. Words are regular, common movements… maybe like the finger movements of an incantation. Kinda cool.
I was in the same state: I could type without looking as long as I didn’t think about it. I wanted to get where I could type while looking at the screen or copy from a piece of paper. I rearranged the keycaps on my keyboard in alphabetical order so that if I looked down I would mess up. After a painful couple of weeks (especially with complex passwords) I had convinced my brain that I didn’t need to be looking down to type.
My typing is not as good as yours, though, because I don’t really use all my fingers. I type plenty fast, but I overuse my inner fingers and move my hands more than you’re supposed to.
Upvoting this did not seem adequate.
I would also like to tentatively suggest an optimized keyboard layout such as Dvorak or Colemak, since the inconvenience is minimal if you’re starting from scratch, and there seems to be anecdotal evidence that they improve comfort and lessen RSIs in the long run, but if fretting about what layout to use causes you to procrastinate for even one day on learning to type already then you should forget I said anything.
Getting people to learn to type will be, however :-D
HOW THE HELL DO 80% OF THE COMPUTER-MAINLINING GEEKS I KNOW NOT KNOW HOW TO TYPE. HOW DO THEY NOT KNOW HOW TO USE THEIR PRIMARY MODE OF HUMAN INTERACTION. Figuring that out will be a study in human cognitive biases, for sure.
Yeah, there’s a reason i didn’t mention Dvorak or whatever ;-) So as not to put another “thing to do first” in the way. I know in person nobody at all who actually uses Dvorak. I can’t think of any Dvorak users amongst online friends I haven’t seen typing. (Perhaps there are some and they’ve just never said anything.)
I use Dvorak. It’s no faster and no more accurate, but it does tire out your fingers a whole lot less, and just typing one sentence in Dvorak will enable you to see why. I switched to Dvorak after a bout of RSI, and the RSI never came back.
del
If you work someplace that allows you basic administrator privileges, or just has a friendly systems administrator, it isn’t very difficult to change the keyboard layout in Windows. It can be set on a software level, or you could just bring a Dvorak keyboard in to work.
Unfortunately, half the jobs I’ve had wouldn’t allow this, so it’s not a guaranteed solution. And the software switch is only useful if you have a cover you can throw over the existing keyboard, or can touch-type sufficiently well.
Still, don’t think being employed eliminates the Dvorak option. I looked in to it just recently to make sure that learning Dvorak wouldn’t give me too much of a headache at work :)
del
That’s actually something I’ve never seen pointed out about Dvorak—every comparison seems to be about the speed relative to QWERTY. (Oh, the Wikipedia article mentions it in the first paragraph.)
Colemak user here. It didn’t magically improve my typing speed as I hoped, top speed is 70 wpm and used to be the same with qwerty. I’m pretty sure it’s more ergonomic to type with than qwerty, and I do have some wrist problems, so I’m going to stick with it.
I don’t think non-mainstream layouts are something people should feel obliged to adopt unless they are having wrist problems. Beyond the ergonomics, it’s mostly a weird thing to learn for fun.
Didn’t like Dvorak because it makes you type ‘ls’ with your right pinky, and I type ‘ls’ a lot on unixlike command line shells.
It occurs to me that ‘l’ is also ‘move right’ in vim. I think I find my rightmost three fingers hovering on the top row when I move about for this reason. Wonder if I should try to remap those movement keys...
The vim movement keys actually work surprisingly well in Dvorak. Up/Down are next to each other on your left hand, right/left are on the appropriate sides of your right hand.
that never occurred to me. I may write some bash aliases with a view to reducing long movements today.
The Wikipedia article on keyboard layouts is very interesting and informative.
The nice thing about keyboard layouts, now that we have reprogrammable computers, is that there’s little need to have holy wars over them. Having more people use the same layout is mostly inconsequential to a single user of the layout. It’s very different for operating systems, programming languages and programs, where a lack of users means a lack of support and a slow slide into obscurity and eventual unusability.
Eliezer uses Dvorak, or at least used to four years ago:
Except I’ve been typing for a living for 13 years on QWERTY and never had carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s not clear to me that it has anything to do with keyboard layout.
Reasons one may not have carpal tunnel syndrome may be: 1) independent of their keyboard layout, e.g. their carpal tunnels are very resilient, or they may not type enough to injure them; 2) dependent on the keyboard layout, e.g. for the typing one does one layout may be “efficient” enough not to trigger the syndrome.
The observation that one never had CTS doesn’t separate the two hypotheses (i.e., you can’t tell if you never had carpal tunnel because of 1 or 2).
My personal experience, as well as reports from others (e.g. Eliezer), is that typing on QWERTY did cause CTS, and after switching to Dvorak (for many years now), without any other visible change in typing (quantity or kind) the symptoms disappeared.
From this evidence, the conclusion is quite clear that Dvorak is better for CTS than QWERTY. To be unclear about it you’d need to also have observations of people that had CTS with Dvorak but not with QWERTY. (However, it’s also clear that QWERTY is enough for some people, and that you’re likely in that category.)
(Of course, the conclusion is “clear”, as I said, based on the evidence cited. It’s not a lot of evidence, so it doesn’t mean that the conclusion is definite in general. I just pointed out that you have more evidence than your personal experience that you’re ignoring.)
(ETA: Also, it appears that you don’t quite need to worry about it. Similarly, I picked Dvorak when I had CTS, my CTS went away, and I don’t need to worry about layouts better than Dvorak. That doesn’t mean I’m not clear about Dvorak being less efficient than other layouts.)
Incorrect. As QWERTY is the standard, most people who have no problem with QWERTY don’t switch.
Therefore, people for whom QWERTY is more efficient than Dvorak are highly unlikely to ever use Dvorak enough to develop problems (such as CTS). If, say, 10% of the population was better off with Dvorak and 90% was better off with QWERTY, you still wouldn’t expect to see people developing CTS with Dvorak, then going to QWERTY, because most people start with QWERTY.
I’m not saying that QWERTY is better for anyone than Dvorak (personally the only reason I stopped using Dvorak was because I couldn’t work out how to change the commands for ctrl-c, ctrl-x, ctrl-z, ctrl-s etc. to be in the same positions, rather than spread all over the keyboard) merely that it’s a perfectly reasonable possibility given the evidence presented.
My brother has used Dvorak for the past 10 years.
It’s easy to learn. You can still retain qwerty proficiency. It does feel nicer for typing English. It doesn’t help programming. It’s annoying to use multiple/public computers.
There are quite a few layouts that may be better than Dvorak. But probably not by enough to justify the extra effort of choosing one.
I first learned how to touch type on Dvorak, but switched to qwerty when I went to college so I wouldn’t have issues using other computers. I found that I could not maintain proficiency with both layouts. One skill just clobbered the other.
Maybe that’s true once you try to get extremely fast with both.
Since elementary school typing class, I’ve been 80+ wpm qwerty.
I only learned and used dvorak up to about 50-60 wpm. Perhaps I never could have built maximum competence in both. I definitely noticed some mode-switching overhead.
I disagree. (And am biased as it gets.) Qwerty is really pretty bad. But looking out for the available once might make a difference in experienced typeability.
The network effect of keyboards is marginally. Some are preinstalled in your favorite OS, some are not. But otherwise you end up with about the same effort for relearning and explaining to other computer users why yours works different, that you can really invest a few hours to first look up which layout suits you the most.
You may have misunderstood me.
Dvorak is probably worth learning. I’m saying that (except if you spend most of your time typing non-English text, e.g. some programming language that has much more typing time than thinking time), it’s probably not worth finding a more optimal layout than Dvorak.
In fact, if you have examples of the types of text you most often type, you can find a nonstandard layout using computer optimization, which is what I was thinking of.
My rough view is that for typical English text, the efficiencies are:
qwerty: 85%
dvorak: 97%
(all other layouts): at most 100%
So it’s better to just learn Dvorak now than to choose something that has more implementation effort than choosing the layout from a menu (iphone, windows, mac, and unix will probably all have a menu that includes a dvorak mode, but not some more esoteric 99% efficient layout for your workload).
The efficiency numbers I give are in terms of actual trained speed and accuracy. In fact, by metrics like “finger miles”, Dvorak is dramatically more efficient than qwerty. That’s not what I optimize, though. I am skeptical that RSI risk scales mainly with “daily finger miles” (I had pretty severe wrist/shoulder RSI for over a year in the past).
This has made me wonder why I don’t use Dvorak myself. I think it’s mostly because I didn’t learn the full keyset I use for programming. And I would probably prefer one of the more-like-qwerty punctuation layouts (that mainly rearranges letter keys), but I don’t want to decide …
I’m guilty of not really following my own advice, so I welcome a refutation :)
I try my best, but I also am very biased and probably not an expert.
The main effort in switching layouts is a fixed re:training time, and then some minor hassles when interfacing with other people. It is not the time to install the new driver! (I usually regroup the keys on my keyboards, but thats also a fixed time per keyboard bought and some low level fun.)
There is no research I am aware of that confirms the RSI/finger movement connection. All pleasure derived from my Layout of choice is purely subjective.
The point I tried to make is that it pays to choose well before deciding to spend the effort for training a new layout. Take a few hours to reach a somewhat reasonable decision and then go about it, instead of just following a subcultural trend.
I think you underestimate the possible benefits gained from a better designed keyboard. There is a lot of space at the top.
What makes me like Neo tremendously besides the optimization are the additional layers. Pay attention to the 3rd layer in the overview. All brackets are nicely available in the center field.I would like to see that tacked onto any other layout one might choose.
(I am also disappointed that professional researchers into work ergonomy did not attack this topic on their own. The layouts I checked out seem to be fan projects. And with current technology it is almost trivial to calculate a good one at home.)
And being somewhat of a language buff I can type all latin-based languages natively from my keyboard. Without installing anything extra or switching layouts multiple times. That might not be too important for all-english writers, but for me that means some benefit with my 3rd language and possible later ones.
I would expect that someone interested in the topic is not immediately aware of the possibilities offered.
Actually before relearning I calculated the expected benefits and came out with what economists call a black 0 meaning some minor benefits. It is more valuable to retrain to another layout when young, and when you expect to write a lot of text over your lifetime. Programmers might be on the edge of not benefiting too much from it. But I find the experience of having to relearn highly interesting in itself. It helps in empathizing with computer newbies.
If you decide to go for a new layout, give at least Colemak a good thorough look. If not, no harm done.
Disclaimer: I use NEO since 2006, after a brief try with dvorak]
I agree that subjective pleasure with your choices is very important.
I just remembered another reason I chose to stay qwerty—emacs keybindings and video games (although I’m video game abstinent for the past few months). The default letters-as-commands mappings would have to be changed or positionally relearned for each such application I’m familiar with (similar: ctrl-z x c v in windows). Overall I didn’t feel like investing the effort to resolve the annoyance, but I guess I wish now that I had made the investment; I’d probably enjoy the result as you do.
The effort of installing a new layout isn’t much, you’re right (unless you hop computers often). It just might be if you use especially limited devices (does the iphone/ipad keyboard even support arbitrary layouts?) that you sometimes need to qwerty anyway.
The NEO developergroup payed attention to many of those. They also collected common sets of two or three letters from common applications. So the Smiley becomes just one roll over three buttons. I probably reap some benefits from that once I get back into Lateχ. In general I like to use tools that are optimized over my current horizon and can surprise me with thinks already put in way after I started to use them.
You can make the investment at any time you choose. Once you did the calculation changes (thanks to sunken cost) but before that its a matter of finding a convenient time space. Like when one is sick at home, or in holidays.
Iphone/ipad does not have Colemak or generic support for different layouts. Not sure about Dvorak.
I know at least 2 Dvorak users, 1 Colemak user, and 1 NEO user personally, and a few who are interested to learn.
For anyone interested in switching layouts: skip Dvorak and go to one of the newer computer optimized layouts right away. I found it an interesting experience to have to re:learn how to type.
There’s a really interesting comparison of popular keyboard layouts and proposed optimizations here: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/
The author uses dynamic programming to calculate the various costs involved with typing (like finger movement, distance from home row, etc) and uses that to generate better layouts via simulated annealing. I thought it was a nicely quantitative take on a subject that is usually so subjective.
Although he had the right idea, I think this author’s analysis was rather poor. I don’t think he did a good job of modelling the importance of different kinds of typing strains. I like Colemak a lot better.
This seems like dogmatic adherence to tradition. Is there actually evidence that the traditional method of touch typing, where each finger is assigned a keyboard column and returns to the “Home Row” after striking a key, is at all faster, more efficient, or ergonomically sound than just typing intuitively?
I ask because I type intuitively with ten fingers. I know where all the keys are, and I don’t see the need to return each finger to the home row after every single keystroke, which seems inefficient. If I type a common sequence like “er” or “th,” I do it with a single flick of the hand, not four separate ones.
Also, I cover a much larger portion of the keyboard with my right hand than my left, because it’s stronger and more natural for me than assigning each finger the exact same amount of keyboard real estate.
To be specific, typing “er” involves lifting my hand upwards, hitting “e” and “r” with my middle and pointer fingers in quick succession, and then dropping my hand back down. Typing “th” involves lifting my left hand at the same time as I shift my right hand slightly leftwards, and striking the “t” slightly before striking the “h” (though I often transpose the two actions and end up typing “hte” or “htat”).
You do “th” with one hand? I suggest that is less efficient than coordinating two shorter moves by the respective nearest fingers. “rt”, of course, is a hand flick. Perhaps my vim navigation has biased me. “h” totally belongs to my right trigger finger and moving my left middle finger all the way over to the ‘t’ so that a left hand flick can pull of a ‘th’ rapidly sounds like far too far out of the way.
Then you’re fine. Two-fingered typing is the curse that we must quash. (But I don’t speak for David.)
I don’t know of any studies (although they probably exist), but (a) touch typists I know are much faster than touch typists I don’t know, and (b) the world’s fastest typists are, as far as I know, all touch typists. Sean Wrona, currently the world’s fastest typist, uses touch typing. So did Barbara Blackburn, the previous world’s fastest typist.
I definitely agree, but that’s party because my right hand rests at an odd angle. I’ll sometimes lose the home-row on it, but it gives me much faster access to Home/End keys, as well as the numpad and the mouse, and usually those benefits far outweigh the advantages of a “traditional” typing pose.
The problem with tradition is that it’s generally only applicable to a specific set of circumstances :)
Until about a year ago I couldn’t touch-type either. I fixed it painlessly by removing my keyboard’s keys and reinserting them in random positions.
This would only help you if you already know more-or-less where the keys are, but you’re too lazy to go a bit further and type without looking at the keyboard. It works because looking at the keyboard no longer helps, and you have to keep your fingers on the home keys to keep your sense of where the keys are.
If you manage to memorize the new letter arrangement, just rerearrange.
I find typing an entire sentence with my eyes closed is one of the best ways to develop good typing skills. It’s really weird feeling myself correcting typos before I can svn see them. It also penalizes errors a lot more, and thus encourages a “get it right the first time” style of typing, instead of my usual “make mistakes and fix them” style.
(Typed the preceding paragraph blind. “svn” is a typo for “even”, and I was only aware I screwed it up ^^)
It’s also a fun “party trick”—I like to creep out co-workers by turning to listen to them and continuing to type :)
http://www.daskeyboard.com/model-s-ultimate/
One can get fast enough using intuitive typing that I would imagine that the main bottleneck would be the need to pause and think of what you’re writing, not the speed of your fingers.
Although it’s frustratingly slow, I seem to have the impression that writing by hand sometimes produces higher quality (unedited) text, because you have more time to think about what you’re writing. Of course, because it still isn’t good enough without the edits you can really only do with a word processor, overall it’s still an inferior choice.
Depends. If I could type as fast as I talk, I would write more and better.
(I write, speak and think pretty much identically. This is necessary to being a certain species of good writer.)
Typing “cat>>tmp.txt” gives me a terminal where I can only add lines, not remove them. This gets me writing a first draft brain-dump pretty efficiently—to the point where I plug in a larger keyboard, because this netbook keyboard is too slow. (Need a Model M.)
I’ve seen many authors say that writing in a medium where you can’t go back and edit as you’re writing gives better results, as you train your brain to get stuff right the first time. Also, typing a second draft completely afresh (rather than word-processing the first draft) gives good results. These are, of course, in the class of techniques for writers to try applying to see what works for them personally.
Back in the olden days, before this “web” rubbish, my friends and I would write multi-page first draft letters to each other, rambling on about whatever rubbish (generally indie music).
Anyone who doesn’t touch-type: If you don’t need to type faster, don’t learn to touch-type to type faster. Just learn it.
Why?
To free your eyes so that they can “hold on to” and follow your ideas.
ETA: for this reason I also use texmacs instead of latex.
If you are reading this and want some typing practise:
http://www2.ie.popcap.com/games/free/typershark
It’s a “sharks are going to eat you, type the word on the side of them to kill them, get more, faster sharks and longer words as you progress” game.
Too bad it needs Java.
Here is good touch typing site, which doesn’t force you to type stupid rows of random characters but adapts to your current efficiency per key. https://www.keybr.com/
Hm, I seem to be another exception and a new kind of exception.
I had a typing class (3rd grade) and used software for learning typing (Mavis Beacon on a Mac). Neither helped me to touch type, but I still learned to use all fingers when typing, and today I can do ~90 WPM—although that’s brain-to-typed letters; I go slower for transcribing a given text. I also use an ergonomic split keyboard that’s much harder to use one-handed.
And the way that I learned was through gradual adjustment after needing to type a lot. Basically, I started out as a hunt/pecker (after trying Mavis and the classroom) and then made it a habit to, every once in a while, type a letter with a nearby finger instead of the forefinger. Over time, my hands moved less and less until they just settled on the method that is touch-typing, depending on what you count as T-T, since I have some quirks.
For example, I usually do capital letters with one hand (pinky on shift, one of the remaining other fingers for the letter) rather than using the opposite hand to shift.
And I actually prefer using the keyboard when possible: for a while I was on a quest to see how long I could go without using the mouse, even so far as to add and edit a firefox extension that let me browse the web with one hand on the keyboard. (I took one of the existing ones and changed it so it only used keys on the left side of the keyboard.)
At an earlier job we moved buildings, breaking down and setting up our workspaces. I had been working away as usual for over a week thereafter before realizing I had neglected to actually plug in the mouse.
For mouse haters who use a Unix: Ratpoison.
More general answer: Category:Tiling WMs. (I personally use and help develop Xmonad.)
And how does this not make you a special snowflake?
Huh?
From the post that you replied to:
Yes, I’m familiar with that comment, as I was before you made your first reply, and your point still isn’t any clearer. Why don’t you try again, and this time, say it explicitly, so I can either appreciate your insight, see your error, or confirm your rudeness.
My point is simply that what you are doing is not touch typing; if you transcribe slower than you can type from your brain then you are not touch typing. People who touch type find transcription a lot faster since they do not need to think at all. I find your narrative an elaborate excuse for not simply learning to type properly.
Okay, thanks for stating your point—this should have been your first comment.
Now, could you provide a source for your claim about “people who touch type find transcribing easier”? Your reasoning doesn’t make sense: when I transcribe, having to learn what I’m supposed to type is the bottleneck, which is why typing what’s already in my head is faster for me—I skip the stage of reading. I also don’t think about each individual letter as you seem to be implying, and I type as fast as the OP touch-typist claims.
I can even type fast enough to transcribe people talking. (The accuracy isn’t good, but it’s high enough to reconstruct it afterward.)
I use 10 fingers, I base 8 of them on the home row, I type a touch-typing speeds, I use a keyboard optmized for touch typing, I use the keyboard in preference to the mouse; what exactly would “learning to type” include, and how would it be an improvement?
Maybe I misunderstood you; I guess I leapt to the conclusion that when transcribing your eyes moved between the source and the keyboard. If that were the case then “learning to type” would mean learning to type without ever looking at the keys. It sounds like you do that. If you didn’t do that, then its a safe bet that while your 90 WPM is “good enough” you could almost certainly transcribe faster if you could keep your eyes on the source all the time.
I don’t ever look at the keyboard when transcribing, or typing in general (except maybe on the occasional symbol). The slowdown in transcription is not from having to look back at the keyboard.
I can concur with the reporter’s comments in that transcribing is faster for me (as a touch-typist), and more accurate. I can disconnect my brain when transcribing and just let the text flow from my visual center straight to my fingers. When transcribing properly you’re not actually “reading”—I, at least, retain very little of texts that I transcribe.
This is why learning to speed read is so difficult for me.
If I look at a word I’ve read and subvocalized it. I can’t not read a word that I look at. I can try to ignore parsing full sentences and their relation to each other, with limited success, but not at the scale of individual words or letters.
He was partially melted with an itsy bitsy soldering iron as opposed to having a wedge cut out with an itsy bitsy scalpel. Less neat but also smoother.
From this, it sounds like I was lucky that I took a typing class in in high school (mostly because I wanted some easy credits). Do most schools not offer this?
The typing class I took was by far the best, most useful class I had in four years of high school—and the only one where I could not have learned the material better by simply being left alone in a quiet room with the textbook. (Although being left alone with a computer and a decent learn-to-type program would probably have done just as well; but this was 1994 and my school had typewriters, not computers, so the teacher was actually useful.)
Seconded, typing class was by far the best, most useful class in all of my years of schooling. I took it in 6th grade.
I think it’s pretty common. I had two years of it in middle school. It never really stuck though; all my attempts to learn proper home-row style touch typing were a complete wash. After about six or seven years of computer use, I realized that I had absorbed the locations of the keys in my muscle memory, and was able to touch type in spite of not using proper form; as Kaj Sotala says, the bottleneck is thinking about what to type, not typing it.
I’m not sure how many people are equally ill served by the various teaching programs that are available, but I’d be surprised if I’m the only one.
Mine has an assessment in it in early high school, but it’s not a main part of the course and you only learn it if you take applications. (As opposed to Multimedia, Programming or Hardware.)
Anyway, I got from about 15WPM to 25WPM at school. Then I got my own computer at home, and in two weeks I was up to 60WPM just from using it so much.
I’m now at around 75-80WPM
Mine required it, although it wasn’t just typing.
Mine never did (1980-84). I learnt at 23 after I’d been editing a fanzine for a few years, something which required me to type a lot. And learning to type with ten fingers instead of two took me from 15-20wpm to 40wpm within a few weeks. SO WORTH IT.
Many years ago I learned to touchtype by typing:
a few times everyday, using the ‘proper’ finger positions. In a week or two, I was touchtyping.
Some months ago I injured my left hand and had to type using my right hand only (I switched to the right-hand dvorak keyboard layout). I did not have much patience for the above practice sentences; I just practiced them a few times then jumped right into actual typing. A couple of weeks later I was touch typing comfortably with only my right hand.
It may just be a matter of patience.
I’m learning to touch type at the moment using some of the information on here.
Currently I am practising with the key board covered using the lessons here. Will post my results as I go on.
The thing that really worked for me was that I was writing a fanzine at the time (1990), so had plenty of stuff I had to type. So I learnt all the keys, was at 20wpm which was slightly less than the 23-25wpm I could do two-fingered, and went ahead typing actual stuff I had to type properly with ten fingers.
tl;dr Have actual stuff to type, use your new skill.
I tend to type with just one hand a lot of the time. I’ve trained with touch-typing software, but I never managed to learn to type all that quickly. My “one-and-a-half-handed” typing is about as fast as I’ve ever gotten when trying to touch type properly, so I haven’t bothered to try to practice more. (I think I do about 30 WPM.)
My father, on the other hand, is a 62-year-old engineering professor who still can’t type with more than two fingers. When he tried to get tech support from a chat room once, the support guy kept asking if he was still there.
I never had the self-discipline to stop looking down at the keyboard. I eventually forced myself to learn to touch-type by switching to Dvorak. I still have to look at the keys to type numbers (which are the same under both layouts); I should probably paint over those keys with whiteout or something.
I never learned how to formally touch type. I seemed more adept than what seems average, based on your impression. As a programmer by trade, my father also knew the importance of me learning how to type, so when I was around ten or eleven he set out in getting me on board with a typing program. I thought it was boring and didn’t last very long. By the time I got to the end of high school, what with me having learned touch-typing through brute force from my habit of writing essays for fun in my spare time, let alone for homework, I could type between forty and fifty wpm.
Now, five years later, I can type between fifty and sixty wpm. Since then, my father than others remark they’re impressed by how fast I can type. People seem to think I know about computers, because I must use them lots, because I type fast. However, I only know how to type. I’ve tested my ability multiple times by closing my eyes while I type, and I think I’m able to type just as fast. Typing with my eyes closed produces an error rate that’s as good as when I have my eyes open, so that’s seems a valid test that I’m touch-typing for real, at all. I think my biggest problem now is my error rate. I think my biggest problem now might be my error rate, and making mistakes. Do you think it would be worth it for me to by training with a formal touch-typing training program or game now, or am I good? For the record, I don’t think I’ll end up in a career where build software, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I spend most of my time on the job behind a keyboard.
I might be the snowflake here. Every time I tried to learn 10 finger I got bored and broke off. But I developed a reasonably high speed anyway. A few years ago I started using Neo which is just awesome, but optimized for German. (Still it has some features Colemak and Dvorak are missing, maybe someone likes to dig into this and prepare an engl. version.)
After that I basically had to relearn typing, and did so the same way. My current type speed maxes somewhere at 400CPM which is way more than I actually need.
The OP has a great point. Learn your tools! In case of the computer that includes to use keyboard shortcuts and optimize commonly done activities.