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.

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.

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.)