Casual Fridays: Typing quirks

Egads! The changing word color totally tripped me up! I was backspacing all over the place.

My only typing class was a summer school class during grade school, where we typed on manual typewriters with tape over the keys. I never thought about it again, and suddenly discovered when we got a computer that I was really fast. Perhaps my training at the piano, or just the fact that I think very quickly? I had to take the typing test again, after I took your survey, because I knew I could do better. I improved my net by 5 wpm and improved accuracy from 94 to 96%. But I always type fastest on full-sized keyboards, instead of the laptop I'm on write now.

I had a friend in high school who was an excellent pianist and could type extremely fast -- over 100 WPM. Greta, who's a competent pianist and a wonderful oboist, types much faster than me.

I think I'm going to add a question about whether you've had musical training to the study. It's early, so the difference in surveys for early responders shouldn't matter much.

I never realized how heavily I rely on auto-correct. I had some mandatory Mavis Beacon typing classes in elementary school, but I am mostly self-taught through lots and lots of experience. I noticed that my main errors on the fishing text were capitalization errors and simple misspellings, such as "form" instead of "from", or "Guld" instead of "Gulf", both of which are caught by Word, at least.

I'm a self-trained typist and computer programmer. I do very little transcription in my day-to-day work.

I generally work in a hunt-and-peck style, with my eyes in the general direction of the keyboard to see where my hands are, since I don't leave my finger on home row. My fingers have learned where all of the individual letters are, and I can drag my eyes away from the keyboard long enough to read ahead a sentence or two when doing transcription without stopping typing. Doing that on the test I scored 59 net WPM. I know from experience that transcribing data that is not English language text I am much, much slower.

I'm kind of sad--I'm sure I used to have a better score than 97 WPM, but oh well.

I hated my typing class. I took it in seventh grade, and back then it was about 3/4 on typewriters and 1/4 on computers. It was very irritating for me because I had been using computers since I was 5, but there was no way to get out of the class. I usually finished my assignment in about 10 minutes and spent the rest of the time making the typewriter predecessor to ASCII art, or typing notes to drop in my friends' lockers. (We weren't allowed to, you know, read a book, or go to the library, or work on homework once we were done. Boy, do I love the American public school system.)

The test was just straight text. For programmers and systems people like me it was weird because there was a very low percentage of Control key, shift and odd characters like parens, $ # @ > and so on. I never realized how much time my one finger is on control or shift or the equivalent of alt while the other hand is up on the top row somewhere.

I made the switch to Dvorak about 5 years ago, and it was one of the best moves I've ever made. It's not too much faster (maybe 10 wpm tops), but the improvement in comfort and accuracy is remarkable. I type all day (I'm a software engineer) and have no wrist pain whatsoever. Whenever I have to type on one of my coworkers' keyboards, I'm amazed that anybody is able to stand typing on it full time. It's just so uncomfortable.

When I switched I went cold turkey off Qwerty. I moved the keycaps on my keyboard around and didn't touch a qwertyboard. I then spent about a week with a near inability to type, and it took just over a month to regain my speed. I can still type >60wpm on qwerty, and I scored about 80 on this test with 100% accuracy.

Qwerty was designed to slow you down; dvorak is the way typing was meant to be. See www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak for more information.

Of course, with the advent of voice recognition this will all be moot in the next 15 years.

I should have noted in my comments that short pinky fingers run in my family. I have a hard time buying gloves because they're usually too small -- except that I can fold the pinky almost in half. I almost never use my pinkies to press any key that isn't on the home or bottom rows, because they don't reach! I could move my hands up further, but I doubt that would be any faster than just using my ring fingers. Despite that, I still manage to type around 80 WPM.

I'm on my laptop too, and it took a few runs after completing the survey to get my speed up to "normal". I detest small keyboards.

As a hunter-pecker I'm interested to see how you handle us in this survey. Using two fingers to type isn't really a "quirk," so much as a totally different motor activity. :)

The test requires some downloadable plugin which I don't have, and am not going to bother downloading.

FWIW, I learned to touch-type c.30 years ago on a manual, but since moving to computer keybaords, know I have at least two quirks: First, I also am not properly ambidexious about the space bar; and second, I know I rely heavily on destructive backspace (for corrections). Also, as someone else commented, as a software engineer I'm rather used to using the "unusual" characters, such as (but not limited to) {, â¬, ¬, @, _, ^, and so on (programmers seem to be a lot like mathematicians and love to use cryptic symbols and shorthands!).

I'm glad you added the information on musical instruments, because I'm sure I'm a much better typer than I would otherwise be (never having taken a typing course and being able to do a decent attempt at touch typing these days) because I've played the piano so long.

Although I am a Qwerty typist, this study is very Qwerty focused. I think you should have at least asked us what kind of keyboard layout we use so that the questions about the x and p keys wouldn't be confounded by differences in keyboard layout.

When I took a typing class in 7th grade, I flunked. That was JHS#294, Simon F. Rothschild Junior High, in Brooklyn, New York.

To pass, one had to type (scaled in some way to penalize typographic errors) 50 words per minute. I think it was 50.

When I typed from a printed sample, I averaged 35 to 40 wpm. I sight-read in the neighborhood of 1,500 to 2,000 wpm (having been taught by my mother and father, whose degrees in English Literature from Harvard and Northwestern were cum laude and magna cum laude).

Hence I frequently lose my place on the text-to-be-copied, need to re-find it, and am slowed down.

When I typed from my own head, as it were, I was at about 50 to 60 wpm, albeit with a large standard deviation.

I remember arrogantly telling the instructor: "Unlike everyone else in this class, I shall someday be a rich and famous author, who will hire typists to take dictation from me."

I do, in fact, have roughly 2,500 publications, presentations, and broadcasts to my credit -- somewhere between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 words (defining a word as 6 characters including a space).

As a result, I am not a "touch typist" but, instead am about a 2.5-finger typist. Maybe e fingers. I don't dare change my procedure at this point, at risk of reducing my output.

================
e: Mnemonic to the Base of
Natural Logarithms
by Jonathan Vos Post

e = 2.718281828459045...

It: natural,
I: personal,
so exponent
I appraise.

It: enabling
logs' table --
logarithm,
O base, amaze!

0033-0345
2050-2100
11 July 1983

================

I had typing classes (on a computer) every year from 7th-10th grade, and they made me a pretty fast touch typist (about 105 WPM when typing normal text without a lot of numbers). It was Catholic school and they were extremely strict about form, but I got it pretty well.

However, the one thing I do improperly is use the backspace key with BOTH right ring and pinky fingers, and I have to lift my right hand off the home row entirely to do so, I guess I have pretty small hands.

If I'm typing something like a password that has a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols, I use the number row on the top because it's faster.

If I'm just typing straight numerical data, I can touch type on the numeric keypad only in certain instances.... typing certain strings of numbers that I type all the time like my social security number or credit card numbers. If I'm typing numbers that I don't have memorized, I usually have to look at the numeric keypad every few strokes to re-orient my fingers.

I know that I type differently on my laptop than on a desktop computer. I probably would have answered differently had I used a desktop. On a desktop I use pinkies more often, but on the laptop the only thing I touch with my pinkies is the shift key and the return key (because the keyboard is much smaller, I guess). Not sure how something like that would affect what you're looking for.

I switched to typing on a Dvorak keyboard 15 years ago when watching a presentation at an ergonomics conference. I can still type fluently (touch-typing) on both key layouts, but the Qwerty style just strikes me as unnatural now.

As mentioned, it's noticeably less arm and shoulder stress over long hauls (I'm a programmer, so typing all day), and it makes considerably more sense to my brain. My girlfriend, a writer, was in a car accident and had soft-tissue damage in her shoulder and couldn't comfortably type at the time. She gave Dvorak a try and found that she had a much easier time physically typing.

It saddens me to think that they still teach Qwerty in schools, because all computers can use Dvorak. In the '40s the excuse was the retraining and (more importantly) retooling costs involved, the latter of which is now zero.

For the curious, it's an interesting mental game to learn any new keyboard layout, and one can regain their full speed on a new layout in under a month easily, even just trying it out less than a quarter of their typing time per day. Compared to how long you will be typing for the rest of your life, it's a very short time investment.

(I'm a piano player who experiments with many different experimental keyboard designs, beyond just different keyboard layouts.)

With English as a 2nd/3rd language I found myself struggling with some of the spelling (embarrassingly enough). I am not a quick typist by any account, but I would be interested to see how big the difference is between English and my native language, both in speed and accuracy.

Also, I'm tempted to suggest a reading comprehension study attached to this one, but I don't think the results would be ground-breaking.

for all you numpad touch-typists out there: a cruel trick is to switch the keycaps on a buddy's keyboard so that the order is like a phone dialpad (1,2,3 at the top) instead of the standard order (7,8,9 in the top row). Causes no end of consternation. For a time, I was also a big fan of switching the letter keycaps around on laptop keyboards to spell out people's names, short messages (hello world) etc etc...

The question about the space bar was interesing, but I'm also be curious to know about the Shift keys.
I suspect they might be slightly different because the shift keys are nearly always pressed at the same time as some other key.

For some reason, I only use the left shift key, never the right. Hmmm...