Are you a good typist?

[Rob_Royale]

Me? Not so much. It's quite a hindrance when writing. I'm a bit of a perfectionist so if I'm not careful I stop every couple of lines to go back and correct shit. I literally have to stop myself and think, "Go back after a couple of paragraphs and then let Grammarly do its fucking job."
I took typing in my first year of college in 1987. On a typewriter. I wasn't good then and for years used a keyboard sparingly until the internet and there was a computer in the house and all our worlds changed. I have big hands and the old two-key oops is pretty common. I really wish I'd gone back and taken another typing course.

 

[KeithD]

Yes, and having good typing skills--to the level of your keying being able to keep pace with the composing in your mind--is very beneficial to the writing process.

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm OK. I tend to make mistakes often, and I need to look to recall where numbers and special characters are, but if it's just letters and punctuation I can manage around 60+ wpm without having to look at the keyboard. Considering how much time I have spent at a computer keyboard over my career it's not that impressive.

 

[NakedNymph]

I grew up with computers and learned the right way to type in school. I can easily break 100 wpm pretty accurately if I'm transcribing a document, but I never have to type that fast when I'm writing. The lesson: you don't have to be an amazing typist, you just have to be good enough. You'll get in more practice over time and you'll get there, no problem.

 

[NightPorter]

I do well enough. Not as fast as I would like. When the lines of a story are really flowing sometimes my fingers can't keep up with my mind. I also have short fingers and never really mastered reaching for the number keys.

 

[Trionyx]

It’s interesting why the QWERTY keyboard even exists. Back in the dark ages of typing the individual letters were each on a long lever that was manually lifted to the paper by depressing the key. Typists became so proficient and fast that the levers were hitting each other causing the machines to jam. The keyboard was altered to slow down the typists. Imagine what would happen if the keyboard were changed to have the most common letters in the middle row, less common in the top row and the least in the bottom row. WPMs would skyrocket for those trained from the get go on the new keyboard. Now with the digital keyboards it would be simple to allow each device to have both keyboards available, QWERTY for us dinosaurs and the new one for kids just learning. One alternative layout is the Dvorak keyboard where 70% of the typing is on the home row, not 32% as in QWERTY. In one generation QWERTY would die out and though many devices can be switched to Dvorak, it is not commonly known, used or taught.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I could type at 100wpm years ago, but having not had to transcribe handwriting for a couple decades, typing speed isn't really relevant - my fingers can type faster than my brain can put words together, most of the time. My thumbs on my phone aren't as fast, but with the assistance of a well-trained autocorrect, it's nearly as fast.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I tested myself once, as a six finger typist, and got 100wpm with 98% accuracy. Problem was, I couldn't make time to learn to type properly (unlearn all the wrong muscle memory) - so I never learned to touch type.

Then, when I started writing erotica, I did it all (do it all) on a kindle screen keyboard, about four inches wide. WTF? I've written over a million words with single finger hunt and peck. Fucking stupid, I know, but it gets the words down. I should turn predictive text off, because I rarely use it, and am forever fixing stupid predictive mistakes, which slows me down.

But then, typing this, I see that I use predictive more than I realised, so it balances out.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I'm a great typist but a terrible speller so these things tend to balance each other out.

 

[PennameWombat]

I was in high school in an antediluvian era (late 1970s). My father had always expressed a bit of relief around his WWII experience. At induction, the room of draftees had been asked, ”Who here has first aid training?”Along with others, my father raised his hand. He was assigned as a corpsman on an Army medical ship that mostly spent the war in the Mediterranean tracking the various allied landings. Apparently some of the others were assigned as combat medics. He described seeing plenty of German fighters and said that some of them even wagged their wings. None of them, nor the odd enemy surface ship they saw as well, attacked or threatened his ship. They often had wounded German prisoners on board as well as Allied soldiers.

That as introduction, he was quite emphatic when he wasn’t teaching me first aid skills or coaching my baseball teams, that I should learn to type.

”The army always needs clerks.” A direct quote.

I and one other boy were the only males in our high school typing classes of thirty or so total students.

Thus, I’m a more than solid touch typist (using QWERTY, never bothered to change). My wife, (we met in our forties) who was a secretary or administrative assistant most of her career, saw me typing and said she’d never seen another man type that fast. Of course, speed isn’t everything. I can generally out-type my ‘thought’ process on the first draft, but it is quite handy being able to ‘keep up.’ But I’m definitely not as fast as when I’m transcribing from prepared text. Having spent most of my working life at keyboards, it’s been very handy.

 

[alohadave]

I took typing in high school and never got above 25wpm. I'd always back up and correct mistakes as I saw them for typos.

It's so firmly ingrained, that I'll fix mistakes in online typing tests.

It's just easier to fix something minor while I'm typing, than to wait to fix it later. It's just more work to do during editing and revision.

 

[MrPixel]

I took typing as a summer school class the summer before I entered high school. The "big" present for Christmas that year was an electric typewriter. I never seriously measured my speed; a couple of "meh" efforts to do so indicated I was good for 70-80 wpm. I do have "bash the keys hard" style due to several years on early computer keyboards, specifically the Teletype 33. To get any speed you had to strike the keys quite hard and in a consistent rhythm dictated by the mechanism.

The biggest issue I have these days with typing is the poor quality of keyboards. QWERTY aside, the ergonomics of the ubiquitous flat-key keyboards are seriously bad. There are "typist" keyboards out there (even Dvořák!), but they are expensive and occupy too much desk real estate. Will it ever improve? Nope - scant demand. The standard of data entry performance has become thumbing on a smartphone with auto-correct, and transcribing has gone the way of the dodo bird due to leaps of technology in machine character recognition.

Then there's speech recognition, too. I get a chuckle out of one of our local news blogs where they clearly use speech-to-text software and frequently don't correct the homophone ambiguities.

IOW, typing and specifically touch typing are dying arts. Just like my grandfather's 60 wpm with a Morse code key when he was a shipboard radio operator.

 

[oggbashan]

I used to be a fast two-finger typist, but not since my eyesight has given me problems. Now it takes me three times as long to type a standard length piece with about ten errors per paragraph.

My father, even in his 80s, had kept his skill from his work in the early 1930s as an international telegraphist. The machine he had used was on display in a museum. He was videoed using it. Even sixty years later, he could still type accurately at 180 words per minute, slightly slower than when he was using it every day.

But - telegraphy is all capital letters and no punctuation except the word 'STOP'. No shift key, no numerals, and no special characters.

He could send telegrams in five European languages as well as English.

 

[SamScribble]

Arthritis is not a typist's friend. I used to be quite quick and pretty accurate. These days, when I point dead ahead with my forefinger, people think that I am pointing to something off the starboard bow. And the little finger on my left hand has retired completely. But I get by.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

I write my first drafts on my phone. I think I might be a little faster on my phone than my traditional keyboard.

 

[EarlyDawn1973]

I write my first drafts on my phone. I think I might be a little faster on my phone than my traditional keyboard.

That's how I do mine...

 

[Rob_Royale]

The keyboard was altered to slow down the typists.

I'd like to know who was responsible for this. I need to know who decided to place the Caps Lock key next to the second most-used letter in the alphabet. So I can invent the time machine, go back in time and throw that son-of-a-bitch a beating.

 

[oggbashan]

Some early typewriters and a different keyboard from QWERTY.

Some were just alphabetical a-z, some put the most used letters in the centre, and had to have complicated mechanisms to ensure that keys didn't jam.

The US and UK keyboards aren't the only ones. I have a French keyboard which starts AZERTY and includes all the accents.

My eldest aunt was a 'Lady Typewriter' before the First World War. At the time it was considered a high-tech (and well-paid) job. She earned about half as much again as a male clerk.

 

[Beholders_Eye]

Probably the most important class I ever took was typing: in the 9th or 10th grade; a whole year as I remember. The keys had no letters or numbers on them, so you had to learn by touch. And now, in my eighties, my fingers still remember the keys/letters. I can accurately type with my eyes closed (but not as well as I used to) on the QWERTY part, but not the extra keys on a computer keyboard. I must admit that, with my phone or iPad, I am more likely to use speech-to-text (Hey Siri).

There is an exception -- when engaged in 'personal quality time' in front of my Windows computer, I use Windows Speech Recognition and a headset mic for a hands-free experience. But WSR is very poor compared to Siri, wish it would get made into a less error-prone tool.

 

[TadOverdon]

Yes.

 

[Bisexguy70]

I suck at typing. I hated writing in school. If they only had an erotic typing class
I work on a computer on and off at work. I wish i could type faster. I love writing detailed erotic stories so its frustrating to me. I end up cutting out a-lot of details

 

[IlsaDark]

I'm a terrible typist, and I end up spending far more time reading back through the story I'm working on, and having to fix the countless typos. It's the absolute worst part of writing for me.

 

[TxRad]

How bad can a person screw up with two fingers and a thumb.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I have the manual dexterity of a four-legged hoofed animal, but I still blame all typos on the keyboard. I haven't found one yet that spells worth a damn.

 

[stickygirl]

I am a shit but attentive typer. I notice the finger-farts as I go, but I'm not thrown by them. Rather I see them as breathing spaces for my brain/imagination. I can correct the typo on auto but be thinking at the same time