How to increase your typing speed...Improve your accuracy

[Ezzy]

And reduce your chances of injuring your hands in one stroke of a keyboard!

You can do it all by changing to a Dvorak keyboard setup. Gone are the days that you had to take care not to lock keys together on a typewriter, but we still use the Qwerty keyboards designed to work around the problem.

Here is a link to information about the whole system.

Link.

I took an old IBM keyboard and popped off the keys, then in twenty minutes I had put them back to match the Dvorak system, converting the Win98 O/S takes less than a minute and is simple too, click "Start" / "Settings" / "Control panel" / "Keyboards" / "Language", then the Dvorak setting is under the English (United States), if you click on English USA you get a drop down box appear and Dvorak is the next one down.

After 31 years of Qwerty the last two days have been a blast, it is so Ezzy I want to slap myself for not having tried it before, I have even ordered a new Dvorak keyboard from a store in town, the assistant was interested enough to say he is going to try it too, (ok so maybe it was just bs but it didn't sound so bs it at the time).

The blurb said you could get a 60% increase in speed and a 53% increase in accuracy after 50 - 100 hours conversion training.

I have done 10 hours so far and already my speed is picking up.

 

[LonelyNights]

That is awesome. Maybe I'll have to look into that, I've always been curious about how fast I can get myself to type....I think my best is about 125wpm or something like that.

 

[Lynxie]

One of my close friends reconfigured his keyboard from a qwerty to a dvorak. He absolutely loves it - he says it not only helps him type better, but it's really reduced the aches and pains he used to get in his wrists and hands from typing too much.

 

[Ezzy]

One of my close friends reconfigured his keyboard from a qwerty to a dvorak. He absolutely loves it - he says it not only helps him type better, but it's really reduced the aches and pains he used to get in his wrists and hands from typing too much.

It has helped me in just a couple of days, and had I known how simple it was te do, I would have done it years and years ago.

The feel of the typing is so much smoother than on a Qwerty board, I can't do justice in describing just how good it feels.

It is also a lot less painful than a Qwerty to use at speed.

 

[TirelessTongue]

I've taken college courses on typing. Best money I've ever spent. If you want to increase your speed and accuracy and/or go from the hunt and peck way to the proper way, I suggest taking a college course.

Perhaps there are good computer software programs that help with typing? I am not so sure what is out there right now, but there are alot of them. I type 50 words per minute and I am happy with that. But remember, once you learn how to type that fast, use that skill daily and therefore you will never loose it.

 

[done_got_old]

Typing was a required course for college prep students at my high school. We learned on blind keyboards in tenth grade. Now, 40 years later I can still type 100 words per minute with accuracy. I never look down at the keyboard, so changing now wouldn't give me an advantage............

 

[Ezzy]

I've taken college courses on typing. Best money I've ever spent. If you want to increase your speed and accuracy and/or go from the hunt and peck way to the proper way, I suggest taking a college course.

Perhaps there are good computer software programs that help with typing? I am not so sure what is out there right now, but there are alot of them. I type 50 words per minute and I am happy with that. But remember, once you learn how to type that fast, use that skill daily and therefore you will never loose it.

Using a Dvorak keyboard would put your word speed up to around 80 words a minute in a couple of weeks, and I think the reduced strain on the hands and wrists well worth the time and effort to retrain.

1,000 words will take you 20 minutes now, and only 12 1/2 minutes when retrained, if you type for a living I would still want to convert if I could, just for the time saving side if nothing more.

In case you were wondering, I touch Type too, and I am still finding Dvorak a better system than Qwerty.

I know I sound like so many new converts, but I can already see improvements in my typing speeds.

 

[nycphoto]

Well I could say that I have typing since JHS the way it was taught before and I have never attempted to change my keyboard layout.
I have been looking over your lay out and I don't see the benifits. I think I would be so confused.

 

[Ezzy]

Well I could say that I have typing since JHS the way it was taught before and I have never attempted to change my keyboard layout.

I have been looking over your lay out and I don't see the benifits. I think I would be so confused.

The benifits are quite straight forward: -

Dvorak Pros and Cons

Almost everyone I know who's tried Dvorak thinks it's great, and many claim it has changed their life for the better. But your mileage might vary. Here are some factors that might make switching to Dvorak more or less desireable for you.

* Learning: Dvorak is much easier to learn than QWERTY, especially for new typists. Beginning lessons designed for Dvorak can be much more productive (and interesting) because you can type thousands of real words on the home row.

* Speed: With careful training, it seems most QWERTY typists can switch to Dvorak and regain their old speed in about a month. After that, it's all gravy.

Some people have had trouble regaining their old speed. This seems to happen if they don't give up QWERTY entirely while they retrain, or if they train too hard.

If you have to type constantly and can't afford to lose a few weeks' work, I suggest you put off switching until you can take some time off.

Although many people (including myself) achieve much higher speeds in Dvorak, a few have complained that they still can't type much faster after switching, especially fast QWERTY typists (perhaps 60 or more WPM). Even so, they usually find Dvorak more comfortable.

* Comfort: Dvorak wins this contest hands down. The Dvorak keymap is carefully adapted to the English language. For example, most typing in Dvorak takes place on the home row, so your fingers and hands don't have to move around so much. Dvorak also divides words more evenly between hands, so one hand isn't typing whole words like agree, fact, grass, greater, opinion, regard...

Although Dvorak has alleviated some people's repetitive-stress injury (RSI) symptoms, don't neglect other forms of prevention and treatment. Nothing is a cure-all.

* Accuracy: Most people have trouble typing some letter combinations. In QWERTY, the most frequently mistyped words are short, common, and easy to spell; many are only two or three letters long. Dvorak has typing "demons" too, but they tend to be longer and harder to spell. Only one ("new") is shorter than four letters.

* Compatibility: This is the point on which QWERTY still wins. The people I know who have switched back to QWERTY from Dvorak did so primarily because of this problem. Every popular personal computer that I know of (back to the IBM PC/XT, Apple IIGS, and Amiga at least) can be easily remapped to Dvorak, but there are still some situations when it can be inconvenient, difficult, or even impossible. For example:

o If you move from computer to computer all day.

o If you use a "dumb" video display terminal (VDT) connected to a host. (Using a PC with terminal emulation is usually OK.)

o If you program in un-English languages like Unix shell commands.

o If you depend on software's keyboard commands (as in vi or emacs) that you know by their positions, not their letters.

o If you must use one of the few really shoddy programs that ignore the system keymap, and you don't want or can't find a hard-wired Dvorak keyboard.

These are some complaints I've come across, but I must say I've done quite a bit of programming and computer swapping since I learned Dvorak, and manage to do all right. The only sure-fire show-stopper I know of is having to use a VDT on a system that doesn't support key mapping.

If you must, you can go back to QWERTY within a fairly short time (possibly days, probably hours, maybe seconds), but you will curse every keystroke you have to type in QWERTY, once you've tried Dvorak!

For myself the biggest benefits have been an increase in typing speed after less than a week, and more importantly a reduction in wrist pain to the point I simply don't get any. I type every day without exception, a minimum of 20 pages, with Qwerty my wrists would almost seize up by the end of the day.

Having the ability to type 5,000 different words on the home line instead of just 800 means a 6 / 1 advantage to Dvorak in my opinion, and much less mileage for the fingers a 5 / 1 reduction in finger movement over the keyboard.

There is another setup called Xpert but I did not like the way it looked. The Dvorak has been around and used admittedly be a minority for 70 years, Qwerty has been around for 130 years, and Xpert has been around for 5 years or so.

A Dvorak Typist holds the official World record typing speed. So there might actually be some good ideas behind it.

There may be some confusion to start off with, but as long as you don't try and mix the two styles, when learning the new style, the confusion should be minimized. It took me two or three days to fix most of the new positions in my head, there is still the occasional fluff, but far fewer than I would have thought.

Over the last week my speed has increased by about 15%, in an 8-hour workday that means over an hour and ten minutes I save in typing, this has already made me more productive and I can use that time to get other things done.

I work 95% of the time on the same computer, and I don't have to do much typing on the other two I use, (most of the work on them is form filling with drop down boxes).

It is just a matter of common sense as far as I am concerned, I work in my own office, and I am not trying to change the world, just make my corner of it a little less painful.

The “funny” thing is, that the people who work with me, have seen a big enough change from the old me two weeks ago, to the new me as of this Friday, that they have both said they are interested in following along and seeing how they get on with it.

The boss has threatened to give us more work if we keep finishing early, but there is really no additional typing he can dump on us, if our speeds level out as the theory suggests they will, we will be typing 50% faster with fewer errors. The average savings could cut deeply into those days we have to work late to get something finished and in the post.

I know I would rather do 5 ½ hours of typing a day than 8 hours, and still have all the work completed. How about you?