Since October, when we moved into the new office and I got a laptop, my typing has been horrendous. People at work make comments like, “Who wrote defect summary 87 – oh, it was Ellen, I can tell from the typos.”
It’s as bad as when Caroline felt my typos warranted an MRI.
I’ve been blaming my new keyboard, but that’s a dodge. The typos are equally bad no matter which laptop I’m on.
Finally, I realized what I’m doing wrong. If I’m using a normal keyboard, I’m sitting erect and watching my hands as I type, but if I’m using a laptop or iPad I am reclined and ignoring my hands.
One would think that if I could teach myself finger-style guitar, I could learn to touch-type. Perhaps I should take up typing as a hobby.
4 responses to “Typing Diagnosis”
I’d suggest “practicing” as you type your blog posts, but then you might post less…
If you’ve got space, you can get a USB keyboard that is a Real Keyboard as a hack to get you to behave as you did with a regular computer, perhaps. But yes, really learning touch typing will 1. reduce typos and 2. increase speed (it is so much faster). But it is not a Fun and Interesting thing to practice, sigh. Good luck!
KC – what I need to do is slow down. I think I was once at 70+ wpm just relying on my index finders and thumb. You know what’s odd? I can program in PL/SQL for days and not make a typo.
Oh, that’s interesting! Most people do type slower when coding, because usually coding is simply *done* slower than, say, transcription (either of someone else’s speech or of your own uninhibited train of thought), so yes, that would suggest the typos are a speed (or possibly attention?) thing rather than a mechanical problem with hitting the right keys. I’ve never done anything with PL/SQL, but SQL rather severely penalizes for mistakes, so there is that – one key off, and it’s broken either loudly (annoying) or silently (VERY VERY BAD), so you may subconsciously just Not Allow Mistakes, in addition to the speed check of building out the logic of the stuff while typing it.
My wpm rate heavily depends on what I’m doing, but I’m pretty confident that 70+ wpm when not touch typing (!!!) and using only your index fingers and thumbs (!!!) is very impressive!
KC- Just as “”Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books / But love from love, toward school with heavy looks,” even writing a defect report in English is more fun than programming PL/SQL. And I like PL/SQL.