Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Is this a medical concern, or are you trying to improve speed?
If you work in a data entry job, I guess it makes sense, but if you're actually spewing out so much code or documentation that typing speed is becoming an issue.. you're either a mad genius or producing some very poor quality code!
I honestly think when it comes to most non-data entry jobs.. quality is generally better than quantity. A few slowly typed but well thought out lines are always going to be better than a page of garbage.
Eventually you'll hit a wall with your non-standard typing, and have to switch. Or start with proper typing, and work your way back up to speed that way.
Should I switch to Dvorak
No. Even if you gain speed on your keyboard, the ability not to suck on other people's laptops is totally worth the 20 WPM decrement or whatever.
I went the Dvorak route. I never bothered switching keyboards or keycaps, so I learnt to touchtype blind. It took me about two weeks of casual use to get up to the speed of my QWERTY keyboarding skills and I improved much beyond that. I do about 80 WPM now. I also didn't forget QWERTY. I can still type QWERTY as well as I ever did, at a sufficient but painful 30 wpm.
My opinion: if you can achieve over 80 wpm with your version of hunt and peck, you're not making many errors, and you don't need to look at the keyboard to keep up with live (typed) chat conversations, then that's really all you need. Higher speeds is just going to stress the tendons. If you are truly held back in pouring your ideas into the computer at this speed, then you should have employees.
[
I'm personally fine with my awkward typing technique. I say if you've reached speeds that you're happy with and your typing method is not causing you any issues such as tendinitis, why change? I've never understood the obsession with you must do it "the right way."
But, this is my advice and it's worth what you paid for it.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
"Honey, could you come figure out why my wireless isn't connecting?"
"Sure, let me just try re-entering the WPA key and OH MY GOD WHY CAN I NOT TYPE QUERTY ANYMORE?!"
Have fun with that.
As someone who uses dvorak, it's a great deterrent to people who frequently need to borrow other keyboards for a moment...
Not to mention the amusement of watching them type something, look confused, repeat a few times before they say something.
In terms of speed, I don't know about that, but dvorak does leave me a bit more comfy as I leave the home row less.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If you believe the marketing folks, touch typing has never been less important now, than in the entire history of computing.
Everything is going to touch screen non-tactile smartphones, tablets, etc. Touch typing doesn't help much on ipods/iphones.
The idea of typing anything other than "english prose" using a keyboard is dead. All "commands" are given via mice and menus/ribbons. The concept of a "command line" is dead to 99% of the population.
Even worse, "leet txt sms speak" is the wave of the future. If it doesn't fit in 160 characters or whatever it is, then it is literally unthinkable.
Also the tools are dying. I can type pretty well on a clicky Model-M keyboard. Not so well on a mushboard.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
I type perfect touch type style. At my best, I do about 90-120 WPM, same as you. I know I'm quite a rapid typist, almost able to keep up with natural-rate speech. If you are matching me, what are you really trying to achieve?
It's pretty obvious that whatever the metric, you are well within the realm of where other factors are far more likely to make a difference than typing speed. Of course, if you want to "touch type" like other "trained" folks, do like anybody else, and force yourself to actually do it.
I recommend any of the many touch-typing software packages out there. You don't even have to pay much, 30 seconds of GIS brought this up and it seems quite serviceable!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Don't bother with Dvorak. The studies that showed Dvorak to be superior were methodologically suspect, and the reams of anecdotal evidence that Dvorak is superior is largely due to confirmation bias--the people who consciously switched improved largely because they were switching consciously (and trying to improve), and the people who don't see an improvement rarely brag about that.
Instead, a touch-typing program or other class will probably benefit you. A lot of the myths about qwerty keyboards are bogus, and you should see an improvement in your speed because you're spreading the typing load across more fingers and having to move your hands and forearms less than a fast, blind hunt and peck. A little practice on activating your pinkies will probably dovetail nicely with your existing skills, so the improvement will be quick.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I type fast and am accurate. I look crazy when I type in my strange pecking way but it works and it takes the stress off my wrists that 'correct' typing would cause. Stick to what you're doing and screw what other people think.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Go voice, you won't regret it. Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
Switching to Dvorak worked for me. As a life-long Qwerty hunter and pecker, teaching myself to touch-type on Qwerty was too difficult.
Of course, by doing so you will freak-out other people who try to use your keyboard, but I actually enjoy that. Plus, it's easy to switch back and forth.
Whatever you do, avoid discussing whether or not Dvorak or Qwerty is superior to the other. Dead-end conversation. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/18/210216
Some years ago, I read a study by a woman who looked at the technique of several great pianists (eh, one keyboard's the same as another). She found there were some few things that they all played the exact same way. Her conclusion was that for these few things, they played the same way because there was only one way for the human hand to possibly do it. For the other things, their technique varied drastically. There was no uniformity at all in styles. Her conclusion was that if it works, it is correct.
Thus in your case I suggest that if you feel your fingering method for typing is slowing you down, then try to figure out what exactly is slowing you down and see if you can speed it up. That will be easier than trying to use some arbitrary rules that may or may not make a difference.
This is especially true when we are talking about arbitrary rules taught to beginners, where the teachers are often not experts, and the rules are often formulated to make it easier for beginners to learn, not to make you as fast as possible. Going back to the piano example, beginners are often taught to play with their wrists held high, fingers curved, playing on the finger tips. This is decent advice, but sometimes it's faster and more precise to play with your fingers straight and flat (Horowitz did this on fast black-note passages sometimes).
Actually I can give a ton of examples where the 'rules' weren't necessarily the best, and the people became the greatest in their field by breaking those rules (appropriately), but I'll leave it at, "if it works for you, use it."
Qxe4
Speaking from experience, typing qwerty is like riding a bike. No matter how many other vehicles you learn to drive, you never really lose the hang of it.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Whether Dvorak is superior in terms of speed or number of errors may be a toss-up, but as someone who first did hunt-and-peck, then learned to touch-type QWERTY, then relearned to touch-type Dvorak, my experience is that Dvorak is definitely more comfortable than QWERTY.
Besides, feelings of smug superiority can't be properly quantified in those studies.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
If you switch to Dvorak, another thing to consider is using VIM/Emacs keyboard shortcuts. Granted, these are customizable, but apparently my brain thinks of shortcuts as "this sequence to save and quit", and not ":wq". So when you move to Dvorak, you start hitting the QWERTY locations of ":wq", and not the Dvorak locations of ":", "w", and "q". Oh, and I'm yet to see someone in the 110wpm range get a speed increase from moving to Dvorak.
I'm always amazed by people around here that claim to type in the 80-120 wpm range and I have to wonder, how were you all tested? Have any of you actually taken professionally administered typing tests? Or are these guesses or scores from those crappy online typing tests (which are very much like online IQ tests -- "Your IQ is 185!!!!!"). I ask because I've worked with people who claim to type ~90-100 wpm before, but in reality it's usually closer to 50-60.
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.
School
Teacher: Here's a typing test.
Me: OK. (Types.)
Teacher: Your technique is absolutely horrible, you'll never be able to progress like that. If you're going to take typing you'll have to start in the beginner class and relearn from scratch.
Me: No, thanks.
Clerical job interview
Interviewer: Here's a typing test.
Me: OK. (Types.)
Interviewer: 90 WPM, only one error. You pass.
Technical job interview
Interviewer: You've been using computers since the Commodore 64 days and remember DOS. Yeah, we're not going to bother with a typing test. I'm sure you're fine.
My uncle was a journalist who typed with two fingers his entire career. His editor didn't care if he typed them by slamming his face on the keys, as long as the reports were on time and well-written.
So, unless you need to do something for ergonomic reasons or just a mad fit of self-improvement, probably not worth it. Your ring finger will get over the neglect.:)
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.
-knewter
Sure maybe you can jam 100WPM if you're picking the content, but really? I mean on one of the reputable typing tutors that does things like make you use the whole keyboard, all the punctuation and type things like "The forge of the marigolds: Lo! Eleven, thirty-comes early| 35# of sheeps-head costs $87 despite your 11% discount."
Probably I'm just old, despite being a long time geek I learned to type simply because it was an easy class to take in high school. (I already knew how, because my handwriting is awful, so I took lessons young) On the one most of you didn't have to learn to hammer hard enough for a big old Royal manual, on the other hand most of you never knew the pure joy that was the action on the IBM selectric. Seriously, we need those for computers, I'll pay a couple of hundred dollars I don't care, that would be amazing.
When you quote your wpm you are quoting your speed at copying text printed on a page. I can type at about 50 if I think of what I am typing as words and 80 if I don't (just tested it), so I can probably only think around 50 wpm, adding in creating the text while they type, I think 30 wpm is reasonable. BTW, I thought I typed at 30 wpm, and when I was typing, it sounded very slow to me (with many pauses, and backspaces to correct mistakes), so you might want to check what 60 wpm sounds like again.
I am also looking to improve my speed, however I am typing at the rather unimpressive 40wpm, if i really try hard I can get to maybe 55. Is typing faster just a case of conciously trying to put words out faster, or will correcting my technique help? I currently only use my right hand shift and only my left hand on the space bar, and I rarely, if ever, use my right hand's pinky finger. Speeds like the mentioned 110 wpm seem unattainable to me.
I don't see any reason to touch type, I hunt and peck fast enough.
Way back in the day hustling for temp work, typing speed counted. I used Mavis Beacon for DOS which drills you on touch typing - even using your pinky. Got up to about 70 WPM touch-typing - which means NOT looking at your fingers. (Which is why I'm taking your 90-110 WPM estimate with a grain of salt - MB will tell you what your typing speed is!)
Mavis Beacon's like Tetris - it's been around since 1987 and ported to every platform that counts. And it can teach Dvorak too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavis_Beacon_Teaches_Typing
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The first couple months after I swapped to Dvorak, QWERTY was a real pain. I'm now (3.5 years in) competent with QWERTY, though, obviously, not as competent as I am with Dvorak. QWERTY requires a little more looking at the keyboard. Long story short, continued practice does help -- having to log into public machines on campus has ensured my QWERTY skills are in decent shape.
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
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.)
If you can really type 90-110 wpm using improper technique, you are already typing faster than 99.99% of professional typists. I'd call out just about anyone who claims they can type more than 65 wpm or so.
Oh, and there are plenty of places on the web where you can learn proper technique. After that, it's just practice.
Damn, it took me five minutes to type this and I don't care.
Don't switch unless you feel interested in learning different and want to try to keep you brain fresh. There is no other reason to go though the aggravation.
Now personally, I find my biggest pet peeve is how the bumps on a PC keyboards are not on the D and K keys like they were on my Mac. When I am typing in a dark room, I want to search for the home row with my longest fingers. It causes horrible wrist strain trying to search with your pointer fingers for F and J. It boggles my mind who come up with that. It definitely wasn't a touch typist.
And then of course there is the minor problem with how laptop keyboards have absolutely no spacing for sections of the keyboard... Oh the woe of being a midnight typist!
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Due knot worry about yore typing skills. Soon wheel awl use voice input and jesters!
Throughput will bee increased and spelling airs will disappear.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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.
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
typeracer is also a great competition for the office workplace. it's great to see how well the "mad chatters" do, because error free gives a higher score. I would like to see less formal paragraphs to type, something that looks like chat between two people.
I ,oved to Belgiu, &à yeqrs qgo ) qnd these dqys I hqve no proble, szitching betzeen AZERTY qnd QWERTY in ,y heqd ) in fqct I use QWERTY qt zork qnd AZERTY qt ho,e; qnd szitching betzeen the, is seq,less.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
No. Even if you gain speed on your keyboard, the ability not to suck on other people's laptops is totally worth the 20 WPM decrement or whatever.
Never ever switch to Dvorak because you think it'll make you faster. If it does, it's only because you have poor technique; as another reader comments, your typing speed is more determined by the time it takes you to create the content, than how long it takes you to output it.
Switch to Dvorak to get a much more comfortable typing experience. Trust me on this: Switching from Qwerty to Dvorak probably isn't something you notice as being particularly more comfortable (it always feels "like typing"), but once you're fluent in Dvorak and using it 90% of the time, you really do notice borrowing a Qwerty keyboard.
Notice that I do use Qwerty (and now, Qwertz) keyboards often. I can't properly touchtype with them—I need to keep half an eye on the keys—but I have the same style of technique as when typing, meaning my hands are mostly covering most of the keyboard/kezboard. After I've convinced myself I'm using qwerty/qwertz, which usually takes about two words, a sentence at most, I'm fine. This took some time to develop, my hint is not to be too phased about using the crutch of half an eye. Just don't try reading the keys you can't see, you'll just make something bad even worse.
Look out!
At the end of my college career, I noticed my hands and wrists were getting strained, so I spent my last semester switching to Dvorak, Emacs and the Kinesis Ergo Contoured keyboard from qwerty, vi and the Microsoft Natural keyboard.
There's endless debate about these things, and apparently some questions about Dvorak's research methods. There's also new keyboard layouts that are supposedly about as good as Dvorak without sacrificing usability and faster to learn (I'm talking about the Colemak specifically). Ultimately it is very hard to make a strong recommendation for any of these switches based on a solid, unarguably scientific basis.
However, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that most people who switch to Dvorak and the Kinesis keyboard experience some combination of reduced hand strain and faster typing. My personal impression is that the Kinesis does more for strain and Dvorak does more for speed and comfort. I personally had reached a plateau in the 75-90 WPM range with qwerty and now I think I'm in the 110-125 WPM range. I don't think Emacs had anything to do with the changes. The control/alt/etc. keys are hit with the thumbs on the Kinesis, and the escape key is still in Siberia, but in practice I don't think either one has any tangible ergonomic charm once you're using Dvorak.
Lately I have noticed that there are some keys which I type strangely. But I was taught on a typewriter and I learned the classical method--I even continue to find use for the caps lock key, a victim of a lot of unnecessary derision in the programming community. I sometimes hit keys that should be hit with the pinky with my ring fingers. I don't think it's worth worrying about too much if you're not looking at the keyboard, it doesn't feel uncomfortable, and it's not slowing you down. The greatest danger, IMO, is discomfort, followed by speed and accuracy problems. Accuracy is the least of my concerns, really. I can usually feel when I've typed something wrong and I correct it often without looking at it.
If you're looking at the keyboard, you would probably benefit from starting over from scratch, and if you're going to do that, it would probably help to switch keyboard layouts at the same time. It'll prevent you from getting more frustrated at the relearning process.
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.
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I attempted and actually succeeded at this some years ago.
I was a fast 100+ WPM typist on QWERTY keyboards and, after typing on QWERTY boards for 22 years (started in 7th grade, 1974), I learned to type on a Dvorak board. It was difficult, but finally learned it, could touch type almost as fast as I could on a QWERTY board.
However, that experiment pretty much ended there. Sure, I could use my Dvorak board on my own computer, but refused to lug it to work (or anywhere) where I might need to use a computer that, of course, only had QWERTY boards.
Unfortunately, it's a QWERTY world, and trying to maintain knowing two keyboard layouts by touch, was difficult. Not un-doable, but hard to keep separate when burning up the keyboard typing stuff.