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Is Typing a Necessary Skill?
cloudwilliam asks: "The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article on how many schools have stopped teaching touch-typing as a necessary office skill and are now often saying that basic computer skills are more important. I'd agree with the latter, but what about typing? I learned to type on an IBM Selectric II (and still own one, as a matter of fact) in the mid-1980s, and the last time I was tested, touch-typed at around 60 wpm. Is this an obsolete skill? With handwriting and voice recognition technologies, is using a QWERTY keyboard with nine out of ten fingers something worth knowing anymore?"
Better to understand how the computer works, and learn to type as you use it. I don't think that voice and other technologies are going replace the KeyBwa anytime soon though.
I had typing in the 8th grade, and it was the single most practical class I ever had in school, period. You can type so much faster when you learn properly. There's a closer connection between your thoughts and getting them down in the computer. If anything, the prevalence of computers is making typing skills MORE crucial, not less. Before e-mail and word processors, bosses had clerical staff to type. Now the boss himself has to be able to type, too. So everybody needs basic keyboarding skills.
Ask adults who use compuers a lot and can't touch type if they wish they could. I hear a lot of, "Yes, I wish I could type."
60 WPM isn't necessary. 25 would be better than hunt-and-peck.
Well, in my case it was a 10th grade english class which involved 40 page "journals". I was, however, taught to touch type fairly early on.
I want to know what crackpot thinks that you can be anywhere near good at what schools usually think of as "computer skills" (read: word processing, web design, Excel, Powerpoint, email, internet) without being able to type at a half-decent rate.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
Is this an obsolete skill? With handwriting and voice recognition technologies, is using a QWERTY keyboard with nine out of ten fingers something worth knowing anymore?
Uhh... Last I checked, it's the year 2004 and we haven't stopped using keyboards. How could typing, in the furthest stretch of the imagination, be an "obsolete skill?" Let's ask this question again in a decade from now when people might actually stop using keyboards. Unless I'm horribly misinformed, voice recognition is nowhere near popular and just about 99% of the population is still using the QWERTY layout.
Good typing means wrists raised in order to get the most strength and endurance, needed with the old manual typewriters. This also means better blood flow, which prevents RSI, at least to some degree.
It also means less time waiting for your hands to catch up with your mind, and so gets out of the way of the creative process.
All the technology in the world won't hide your lack of vision, talent, or understanding.
Here's your reason to learn to touch-type: Speed.
People who are good and very experienced at the index-fingers method often say "I can type 40wpm easy" (or in your case, 60wpm), as though that's incredibly fast.
But computing professionals who touch-type can hit 110-130wpm (I get 110-120 on a good day). That's about twice as fast. When you're trying to hit a deadline, especially as a writer, it's a big deal to be able to type twice as fast, and that much closer to the speed of your thoughts, not to mention the fact that if you have to type for long periods of time, your accuracy won't suffer as much and your hands/arms won't get as tired if you touch-type, because there's less movement and fewer large muscles involved.
There's also the matter of keystrokes, something that most people aren't as familiar with. The number of keystrokes per minute is at least as important for a hardcore computer user (keystroke tests use additional keys like ctrl, alt, shift, Fn, etc. and also test for number and punctuation skill). The ability to perform ctrl, alt, or Fn keystrokes in the midst of a stream of text typing without pausing and without having to look at the keyboard provides an additional serious speed increase in real-world computer use.
And don't underestimate the drag of having to look at the keyboard, even a little. I can fill a spreadsheet at 110-120wpm, staring at a sheet of paper full of numbers the entire time, using tab and arrow keys for navigation, no pauses needed, just a continuous flow of keywork. I never once have to look at the screen and because I touch type, I know the minute I have made a typing error and can backspace and fix it, all without looking. I would guess that it would take you more than twice as long to enter a page full of numbers and formulae into a spreadsheet application, even if your measured typing speed is half of mine.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Heck yeah, typing is essential. I would argue that it is especially essential to any programmer or network administrator. The faster and more proficient you are at typing the faster you can get your ideas into production or solve problems. Not only typing out words, but also keyboard shortcuts in programs you use everyday will make you a better programmer/network admin. The less you reach for a mouse the faster you go and the less breaks in thought a worker will have. Also, when working with other people it is a great help. For example, if I ask a coworker to help me debug some code, typing proficiency makes the process so much easier. If you can navigate as fast as you or your fellow coworker can think there is no hindrance to your work (navigating with a keyboard is much faster than with a mouse in most cases). Bad typing skills, just slows everything down. This is costly when your work environment demands results ASAP.
Nuttles
There's a limited amount of time to teach students how to do anything in school and even students who want to go into technical careers need to learn the other things. I'd certainly rather hire a developer who is proficient at mathematics than one who can type using all his fingers, let alone the two superfluous nubs we call pinkies.
/.ers and people who make money from computers, shouldn't we do all we can to keep people away from them to keep our wages up?
Lets say students have 2 hours a week of mandatory computing classes, It would be better spent teaching them how to learn to use a computer on their own, or how to research things, how to figure stuff out, how to have fun and otherwise get the most out of a computer so they'll want to learn more, rather than forcing them to pound on keys.
If high speed typing is so damn important the school boards should switch to Dvorak and we all know it.
Besides most jobs really require very little computer use, even good jobs and seldom do they require touch typing. Only typists, dictators and secretaries would truly benefit from spending hours learning that over say learning how a computer works.
And as
Last time I was tested, I was at around 105 wpm with 99% accuracy. That's just a byproduct of using computers day in and day out for years though, and not a result of any typing class. I gradually developed my own touch typing system, I guess.
I believe that schools are phasing this out not because touch typing is not a necessary skill but because most of the students can already type better than the teachers. I remember taking a required typing class 11 years ago and just being bored out of my mind, because I could already type at more than 90 wpm. (This was in sixth grade.) I would finish the daily assignment in three or four mintues and then screw around with the computer the rest of the period. I'm guessing that since then, the number of kids screwing around has increased exponentially and schools finally realized the class wasn't worth teaching any more.
Consider the interaction between a person and a computer as an information processing system, analogous to a PC. In building an optimized system, one must consider the task and the likely bottlenecks. In building a gaming PC, for instance, disk speed and even CPU speed are often less important than the speed of the graphics card.
When a person types on a computer, the bottleneck in accomplishing most tasks is not the bandwidth through the keyboard (typing speed) but the latency introduced by other elements of the system. Specifically, the speed of the user's reading comprehension and the speed of the user to make decisions and mentally transform ideas and concepts into text dominate typing IO for most tasks. The tasks where typing speed dominates, like rote transcription, involve very little need for comprehension, decision making, or complex thought - certainly much less than composing an email or a complex report.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
There's nothing that can humble you more quickly than playing trivia on an IRC channel. Knowledge is often only about 50% of what's required. Speedy and accurate typing is just as important.
Unfortunately capitalization is not required in these games, which is why you're probably seeing a bunch of people bragging about their 110 wpm typing skills with a complete inability to capitalize a sentence properly.
Shawnmchorse and all you other typing speed demons, you're fast becasue you're already plugged into the computing world; you have to type fast to keep up. The article is more about kids who are being shut out of computing because they don't have the KB skills to get in the door yet.
I touch-type in two different systems; my SO hunts and pecks at amazing speed. Both of us are the product of using computers for over 20 years (and, probably more importantly, MUDs and IM for over 10).
Should young kids start being introduced to basic keyboard skills in school? Absolutely! We don't need to mass-produce 60-WPM touch-typists, but we owe it to the kids to teach the skills they need to effectively use computers.
This is something that has consistently annoyed me. The reason backspacing is "soooo" bad is a layover from typewriter era as best I can tell --even on a typewriter with a good working backspace, if you don't notice it before you've gone to the next line, you throw the page away.
This of course is complete BS in a modern word processor. I frequently use not only the backspace key, but things like word-left and the end key to correct my mistakes in a fraction of the time it would take to backspace all the way back and fix it.
A modern typing test should really do a few things:
a) measure mistakes after the entire text is typed. Would work even better with a count-up clock and a "Done" button than with a count-down clock like typingtest has.
b) allow you to use the full range of editing keys in , including things like autocorrect and autocomplete (even when they autocomplete something wrong). Of course this is highly impractical unless the typing test is actually built into the word processor, but thats about the only way to get accurate real-world results using that particular program.
Until those two conditions are met, typing tests of this sort are pretty much only measuring how fast you can type on a really really fast typewriter.
Do you all need to be told that RHETORICAL means that I didn't NEED an explanation?
I understand the definition of RHETORICAL, yes. However, as I did not quote your entire remark, I included the explanation of "prolly" for those who might not have been following the thread closely.
In other words, my intention was politeness, which you interpreted as lack of attention.
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I say it time and time again...
The only class that I ever learned anything from, and still use the skills from, is my high school typing class.
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