Correcting Poor Typing Technique?

An anonymous reader writes "When beginning to use keyboards I did not pay much attention to touch typing technique. Instead, I eventually achieved decent rates by simply doing what felt natural to me. These days my qwerty typing speed is in the range of 90-110 WPM, probably more toward the lower end. While this isn't too shabby, I feel some awkwardness in my technique (such as not using my little and ring fingers when I really should). Has anyone been in a similar situation, wanted to fix it, and actually done so? What do you reckon is the best way to fix half-broken typing? Touch training sessions? Should I switch to Dvorak and pretty much learn typing from scratch, but properly this time?"

Comments

90-110 WPM is fast

[xerent_sweden]

90-110 words per minute is typing really fast. The standard length of a word is five letters and if you measured with that word length you really have nothing to worry about. I couldn't imagine anyone writing faster than that.

Re:Dvorak isn't better

[jjohnson]

Here's the original reference mentioned in my link above. The high points of it are these:

(1) the research demonstrating the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard is sparse and methodologically suspect;

(2) a sizable body of work suggests that in fact the Dvorak offers little practical advantage over the QWERTY;

(3) at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and

(4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years.

Re:Dvorak isn't better

[Anonymous Coward]

The studies are bogus. If you actually try Dvorak, however, you'll find it's much more comfortable. All the common letters are in the top two rows.

It won't double your speed as Dvorak may have claimed, but a lot of people do gain 20% or so on it.

I call bullshit

[pongo000]

These days my qwerty typing speed is in the range of 90-110 WPM

Hunt and peck maxes out at about 40WPM, with burst speeds of up to 70WPM. I doubt this is a sustained typing speed. And there is no indication of error rates.

Yet another fluff piece by kdawson without a shred of credibility. For all we know, he made this up to fill in for a slow news day.

xletters

[knewter]

I had the same problem, and I needed to fix it. I was a transcriptionist and got paid per page, so my typing speed directly impacted my pay. Typing properly will make you type faster, so I learned. You should use xletters. It's what I did. Just play the game for 15 minutes a day and do not allow yourself to use the wrong fingers to type. Done.

Re:Dvorak isn't better

[nadaou]

(1) the research demonstrating the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard is sparse and methodologically suspect;

which has no effect on the truth of the matter, just that it isn't as solidly proven as previously thought. "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" and all that.

(2) a sizable body of work suggests that in fact the Dvorak offers little practical advantage over the QWERTY;

aka many studies show that it is better in a statistically significant way, but not by a great deal. but that's still above the noise level!

(3) at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and

see point (1), but replace Dvorak with QWERTY. (I question their methods and bias of pre-trained qwerty typists used in the study)
Point (2) indicates that there are many studies saying Dvorak is slightly better, whereas there is only this 1 saying QWERTY is better.

(4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years.

in large part due to the "good enough" factor and clever marketing as much as anything else ...

my advice: use whatever the hell you want. learning dvorak prevents brain-rot, in a similar way as shaving with your non-dominant hand does.

I type Shenanigans on the OP

[DontScotty]

80 WPM means 6.5 characters per second - bull sh!t.

http://imlocation.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/how-fast-do-people-type/

"Notice that that out of the three thousand four hundred and seventy five applicants, not a single one could manage 120 WPM. And only the top 5% of applicants could manage 70 WPM or higher."

So - this OP is claiming to be in the top 5% of people who work in professional typing jobs?

Someone needs a re-test.

http://tinyurl.com/yb8zf95

Re:Biomechanics

[xaxa]

I am not a doctor.

I recommend Dvorak for the comfort. When people say it's more comfortable they (among other things) mean they don't have to "reach for an O" as often as they would need to with Qwerty.

For your whole post, typed with Qwerty, you reached for something on the top row 342 times. You reached for the bottom row 138 times.
If you'd typed it with Dvorak you'd have used the top row just 159 times and the bottom row just 61 times.

(There are other awkward moves that are reduced by Dvorak. For instance, CR, BE, EX, UN, MY -- top-to-bottom combinations on the same hand -- hardly exist. Something like grep -i '[zxcvb][qwert]' /usr/share/dict/words --only-matching | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n will help make good comparisons.)

Re:Dvorak

[Synchis]

Actually, this is not normally an issue. Once you train yourself to type in a certain way, your muscles remember how to do it, even if you, consciously, do not.

At the other end of this, is the fact that because of muscle memory, switching to dvorak to fix a querty typing issue often does not solve the problem. (I'm speaking from experience here, because this is what I did.) Most people don't actively think about how they are typing, they type from muscle memory.

Instead, I found the best way to train myself out of bad habits was actually thinking about where my fingers are going and making a conscious effort to stem the bad habits. Re-train your muscles to type properly. It took me a few months of actively working at it, but I have had a fair amount of success with it, and now type properly with all fingers, and look at the screen when I type instead of the keyboard, or constantly shifting from the keyboard to the screen. It has helped a lot with my headaches, as constantly refocusing my eyes was leading to a lot of eye strain.

Re:Why?

[Your.Master]

Interesting. I just tried that out, and I do use my left pinky -- for non-capital a. That's it for letters. My left thumb's sole purpose is to hit alt on occasion, or in really exotic three-or-more key combinations.

Left pinky gets shift and ctrl, and right pinky gets some punctuation and on rare occasions shift. I hit backspace with either my middle or ring finger. Right thumb is dedicated to spacebar, and winkey when I'm using Windows.

Pinkies get a bigger workout when I write code, since all that punctuation on the right, and the tab key on the left, needs hitting.

Typing technique improvement HOWTO

[Walles]

1. Get a Kinesis Countoured keyboard: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm
2. Suffer for a couple of weeks since it feels like starting all over again.
3. Enjoy typing a lot faster than before.

I did it. It works, provided you don't give up during step 2.

Do it right...

[TemporalBeing]

...and get a split-key keyboard. it'll force you to use the right hands/fingers for typing, and you'll be fully touch-typing before you know it. Personally I recommend either of these (despite their maker):

• MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000
• MS Optical Desktop Pro (Mouse and Keyboard)