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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?"
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.
*resists teptation to correct typos*
I think taking tpyeing wuold have helpeed me now, since I'm rather poor at it today. No wonder the backspage key on my keyboars is worn out.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Sure, but if people use computers enough then they sometimes develop their own methods of typing. I guess that could be called some kind of advanced hunt and peck, but it's something. Even if it's just two fingers hunting and pecking at a blistering pace, eventually their muscles will catch up to their brains. Who says touch typing is the ultimate data entry experience?
I also reply below your current threshold.
I call shenanigans. I don't see how using two fingers on a standard keyboard could ever be faster and more accurate than using ten. Your 80wpm...is there any kind of accuracy metric to provide along with that?
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
I have got to say that is the exact oppposite with me. In high school we had a keyboarding class that I greatly accelled in, and within a few weeks attained a score higher than my teacher had set for us for the end of the semester (giving me an A for the course for the most part). It has only been in recent years as I am IRCing and programming more that my typing skills have gone down. I often make errors that I must go back and correct, where as before I would type them correctly the first time.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but the more I learn about computers the slower and less accurate my typing has been. Oddly enough, I rarely make mistakes with hot/shortcut-keys, except I do tend to hit Ctrl+D (shortcut to add a bookmark) rather than Alt+D (transfer focus to a highighted address bar) in Firefox.
I was speaking to a colleague who was running interviews for a post in his organization when he told me that part of the interview he made them do a typing test.
:)
His reasoning was anyone that has spent a decent amount of time in front of a computer will be a good typist - it was a good way to see who was just talking the talk without the know how.
Pretty clever I thought
Yes - it should be taught....with
The Typing of the Dead!
As stupid as it sounds - this game is SO cool. And it showed my how badly I really can't type.
That's a problem. It brings accents into the typing realm. British people AOLspeak very differently from Americans. Australians tend to just type relatively well, which is odd, but they do have their own short forms.
The various slangs are based on whatever shorter way there is to spell the way the typist pronounces a word. Unlike the original online abbreviations such as LOL and ROFL, these new ones are not based on the typographic version of the word.
Accents online is something we don't need. The beauty of someone typing properly is that anyone can read that text and understand it, short of something like "lift" vs. "elevator". I couldn't walk into Manchester's poorer districts and converse reliably. I now find the same is true of typing with Manchester residents.
With Brit AOLSpeak, the first phrase you have to learn is "soz wot" which I think means "sorry, I don't follow." The second phrase is "i fink u spk 2 mingin posh u bastard" meaning "I am angry that you don't type the way I do." I'm not making that up, though I profess no great mastery of the form.
Even within the single local group, the AOL speak tends to vary based on what kind of half-assed typing is being used. People who use three fingers on each hand choose different short forms than those who use only the indexes.
Just as we need other web standards, we need a standard way of writing. It's not unprecedented... consider italic and cursive.
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
At 130 wpm you could write a short novel (40k words) in 5 or 6 hours... that's not how it works. I suppose it might be different if you were writing very systematic technical documentation, but generally the bottleneck is almost always thinking time. It doesn't make much difference if you're typing at 30 or 130 wpm.
Which is not to say touch-typing is not useful -- it's much more comfortable and means you don't have to look at the keyboard, as you say.
Touch-typing is probably the most useful skill I taught myself before going to university. (I wasn't allowed to take "keyboard skills" at school previously - that was apparently for kids who couldn't cope with any other classes. I wonder if they think differently now).