Can You Type?

[Hypoxia]

I write everything on an iPhone.

I am a multiply-trained touch typist, my hands are large, and my vision is now fairly shot. I cannot conceive of composing finished work on my Android phone (5-inch) or tablet (7-inch). Back before the eye infections and surgeries, I (slowly) entered story notes on the tablet, but no more. That's not typing.

I have worked with voice-to-text, handwriting recognition, and gestural interfaces. Keyboarding (Qwerty, not Dvorak) rules. I eagerly await my direct neural implant but I'll bet keyboards will still be better for editing.

 

[R. Richard]

I can type, but I don't let people know. I'm afraid of being type cast.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Typing... yeah, took it in high school... freshman year. It's stuck with me through my life. Learned on clunky old manual Remington typewriters. It had come in handy over the year. First in the Air Force when I worked the desk, then again in school where I learned to program computers.

Yes, I can type without looking at the keyboard or the screen.

About 100-120 words a minute.

Nimble fingers.

ETA: Texting isn't typing.

 

[TheeGoatPig]

Do tell please !

Those are the home keys where you rest your pointer fingers with your other fingers taking up the keys to the left and right. It's so that you can find them without looking.

 

[KeithD]

The markings for the E, A, S, D, N, M, and L keys are already gone on my newest laptop.

 

[blozo]

I could type fairly well until I accidentally sawed one of my fingers off.
I've never recovered my full 40 or 50 wpm even though it's been a long time.

 

[Emirus]

I am a multiply-trained touch typist, my hands are large, and my vision is now fairly shot. I cannot conceive of composing finished work on my Android phone (5-inch) or tablet (7-inch). Back before the eye infections and surgeries, I (slowly) entered story notes on the tablet, but no more. That's not typing.

I have worked with voice-to-text, handwriting recognition, and gestural interfaces. Keyboarding (Qwerty, not Dvorak) rules. I eagerly await my direct neural implant but I'll bet keyboards will still be better for editing.

As I said in my previous post, “I write everything on an iPhone.......Having said all that, it’s what suits the individual and everyone is different.”

My body is falling apart but fortunately, with glasses, my eyesight is acceptable. I’m sorry if I offended you or anyone else by stating what I personally do. I thought that was the idea of this thread.

 

[oggbashan]

The markings for the E, A, S, D, N, M, and L keys are already gone on my newest laptop.

When I use a laptop which I don't usually do, I plug a full sized keyboard into a USB port (and a separate mouse). I started doing that because my first laptop had a French language keypad AZERTY, and my second a US keypad.

 

[ElectricBlue]

The markings for the E, A, S, D, N, M, and L keys are already gone on my newest laptop.

There's a challenge - to come up with a list of your most commonly used words...

 

[EdEc]

After I graduated from grade 8 in June 1957, I enrolled in a typing course at high school. All of the students had large black manual typewriters which had ribbons which were red on top and black on the bottom. Most of the keys were black, so there was no way to know what you were typing by looking at the keys. I recently asked a friend of mine who was in that class with me and who had a typewriter with letters, numbers, and symbols printed on the keys, if he was still a bad typist and he admitted that he was. Our typing teacher should have had him change seats with one of the several girls in class who could play the piano. Those girls could type extremely rapidly and they didn't have to look at the keys.

 

[SamScribble]

I used to be able to type. These days, I have arthritis in three of my fingers and so I'm down to three fingers and a thumb on my right hand and two fingers and a thumb on my left. But we get there.

 

[Athalia]

Mid 60's in junior high. All the electives like woodworking or metal work etc were full. I got typing and cooking. Two of the best things that could have happened.

I totally agree. I learned both at about that same time in my life. My first typewriter was a manual one, but the school had electric ones and they spoiled me. I used to type about 70 wpm but it's more like 50 now. But I still type nearly every day, as it's part of my job as well as my writing hobby. And while I'm not the best cook, I'm not afraid of following a recipe, and I like the control it give me in my diet.

I think all kids, boys and girls alike, should learn how to cook and balance a checkbook. They should be required courses for graduation, because those are skills you'll be using throughout your life. Just as driver's ed should include learning how to change a tire, because if you drive for any length of time, you're going to get a flat tire sooner or later, and the motor club won't always be handy.

 

[Bramblethorn]

(I already finally learned tonight why the F & J keys have little bumps on them )

Do tell please !

The bumps are to tell you where your fingers are on the keyboard. In standard touch-typing, the rest position is with left fingers on ASDF and right on JKL; so if you can feel the bumps with your forefingers, you're in the right position.

From there, you can locate all the other keys: W is directly above the rest position for my left ringfinger, H is to the left of my right forefinger, and so on. But if my hand isn't where I expect it to be, u wbs yo rtoubf ainwrgubf kujw rgua ubarwS,

(Huh, that's actually quite difficult to do! I purposely shifted my hands to the left, but my fingers kept noticing the bumps and trying to correct.)

 

[beautifulzelda]

I don't know how to type.

But here's a story for you. My brother had typing class in high school, and he sat next to Cheryl Ladd nee' Stoppelmoor - (one of the "Charlie's Angels")

Needless to say, he didn't learn much in that class.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Used to be pretty good, but have lost it since keyboards came in.

 

[John988]

[This content has been removed due to a copyright violation.]

 

[redzinger]

Only girls who weren't expected to achieve much in life were allowed to learn to type in school.

This was the '90s.

I think they called the class, 'Keyboard Skills'?

Even then, I knew it would be a useful thing to learn, but I was considered too intelligent to do the class.

I can remember one day one of our classes was held in their room, and both sexes were clustered around a typewriter listening to one of the girls explain how to type. We knew this was something we would need. The school was way, way behind.

Conversely, the IT lessons were utterly tedious. Diagrams about feeds and basic coding explained in the most boring and dry of ways, sharing a keyboard with two or three others. Yawn time.

Over the years, I learnt to type - through time at university, spending a lot of time online on forums and writing emails, and working - and got quicker. Now, I rarely look at the keyboard.


I think I was so keen to learn as my handwriting was always criticised by teachers and lecturers for being unreadable. I started handing typed assignments in as early as I could.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Only girls who weren't expected to achieve much in life were allowed to learn to type in school.

We never had typing class in school, but my mother insisted I learn and found teaching software. Bless her for that.

 

[redzinger]

We never had typing class in school, but my mother insisted I learn and found teaching software. Bless her for that.

My mother bought an electronic typewriter. It had this tiny, calculator-size screen. I used it a fair bit. I don't know what happened to it - I suspect my mother discovered how expensive replacement ribbon was.

I can remember my first experience of Windows - getting addicted to Minesweeper - and going to my mother's work after school and watching her use Word and Excel.

I'm not sure where the rest of my pre-uni knowledge came from. Probably fiddling at my mother's desk. The Internet as a tool for communication came in uni when in my first year, we'd send email messages via Dos, I think.
The Internet was so sketchy in the early days - so few sites functioned reliably. (I wasted a lot of time on the NME forum in early days at uni as it was one of the few which worked.)

I still use the Hotmail account I created in my first year. I was an early adopter/adapter so got a good name. (Nowadays, I don't adapt at all.)

I think I found Lit in 2000/2001, and promptly infected the home dial-up computer with a host of viruses.

 

[jehoram]

I used to use the Columbus system. You know, "Find a key and land on it."

But when I started writing technical manuals, I realized that time is money, and I learned to touch-type. I guess I'm good for forty to fifty words per minute, but I don't make many misteakes ... backspace, backspace... mistakes.

 

[Shelly2inme]

I cin tiep

I lernt two tiep in hi-scool.

 

[JerseyGirlDownUnder]

Only girls who weren't expected to achieve much in life were allowed to learn to type in school.

Yep, this was true in my high school. I put up a stink and insisted I was taking typing, drafting, AND advanced placement courses. The typing was by far the most useful of the classes. I paid my room and board at Universities typing other peoples' papers. Started at $1/page; the rate went up exponentially the closer to the deadline. I typed a few dissertations and learned a lot about typesetting equations and conodonts.

And yes, it's fun to do that trick where you have a conversation over your shoulder and continue typing.

Doesn't make me write any faster, though. The brain is still the limiter.

 

[Blind_Justice]

@redzinger: If you want to learn how to type AND have fun doing it, try to find a copy of the game "The Typing Of The Dead" by Sega. That is, if you can stand ultra-corny zombie video games. We're talking "even cheesier than Resident Evil".

The brilliance in that little piece of software is twofold. Not only is it a good video game to start with (being built on the foundation of House Of The Dead II, a fantastic game in its own right), but the typing teaching part is well thought out and hilarious to boot.

Not sure how difficult it is to get it running on current-gen Windows, but it's worth a try nonetheless.

 

[rescatooor]

@redzinger: If you want to learn how to type AND have fun doing it, try to find a copy of the game "The Typing Of The Dead" by Sega. That is, if you can stand ultra-corny zombie video games. We're talking "even cheesier than Resident Evil".

The brilliance in that little piece of software is twofold. Not only is it a good video game to start with (being built on the foundation of House Of The Dead II, a fantastic game in its own right), but the typing teaching part is well thought out and hilarious to boot.

Not sure how difficult it is to get it running on current-gen Windows, but it's worth a try nonetheless.

I want.

 

[carsonshepherd]

Terrible at typing. Fast but inaccurate and habitually misspell the same words. I type all day at work and I slow myself down because I correct as I go instead of at the end. Errors are anathema.
I can't even spell anymore, just get lucky sometimes.
I hope people at work gasp in awe at the proper grammar spelling and punctuation in my clinical notes. It takes a lot of work to type that badly.