A fun way to get better at typing
By recommendation from my friend Grokmoo, allow me to introduce you to TypeRacer. The site uses the basic “type the given passage without any errors and we’ll calculate your words per minute metric” mechanic, with a twist: each passage you type is in a race against other users to see who is fastest. This makes it very addictive, which is the single-most important quality you want in a learning tool. If you need to work on your typing skills (and in this electronic era, typing skills are incredibly important), definitely check it out. My best typing speed so far today was 127wpm; anyone care to try to best me? :-P
The hardest part of going for really high speeds is not making any typos. When I’m typing so furiously quickly, typos are nearly inevitable, and having to backspace and fix them is very costly. The only way I got that 127wpm score was through sheer luck: I made no typos at all. Also, at really high speeds, I find that I’m not typing individual letters anymore, but rather, entire words and phrases (it’s the same principle as speed reading, except in reverse). Passages that contain lots of unfamiliar words (and the site does have them) have me slowing down to around 90wpm, because I’m back to processing them on a per-letter basis. There’s one particularly villainous passage on the site that’s full of biochemistry terms. Good luck making iwpmt through that one at any reasonable speed.
June 2nd, 2008 at 09:10
What is iwpmt?
June 2nd, 2008 at 09:13
And wow, I’m slow. Typing at my best, I’m only at 80-90wpm after typos and whatnot.
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:32
William: A typo, that’s what that is. But I’ll leave it in just so your comment still makes sense.
And 80-90wpm is still very fast. The average non-techie typing speed is much slower than you realize. Many people can’t even touch type.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:26
I never trust apparent typos from you to not be some kind of joke or allusion.
Thanks.
Theoretically, if I switched to DVORAK, I’d be at around 110 within a couple of months, but I’ve yet to make it through the barrier. I will happily support DVORAK being implemented anywhere, though. At this point, it’s not well-supported enough to make it worth the effort to re-learn. Have you tried, and/or do you use it now?
June 3rd, 2008 at 18:28
Sometimes a typo is just a typo.
As for Dvorak? No, I haven’t seriously tried it. I used to be somewhat interested, but that interest faded over time. Face it, you won’t run across a Dvorak keyboard anywhere; you’ll have to buy and bring your own. Or, if you’re really confident with your touch-typing ability, you can change a setting in the OS to treat it like a Dvorak keyboard, but this is still a setting you’d have to change on every computer you use (and then remember to change it back afterwards if it’s not your computer). It’s just not practical enough. I found it a better use of my time to just get really good at Qwerty, even if it isn’t optimal. I’m not even sure if I could handle two layouts very well, anyway (as I would need to switch to Qwerty when using anyone else’s keyboard temporarily).
Besides, I think the main thing limiting my typing speed is actually my thinking speed. I don’t think I can send out the neural impulses to type those keys any faster. The human mind does have a cycle time beyond which it cannot run any faster. Dvorak would thus only have limited gains for me. I think there have been some studies on this showing that the gain from a Dvorak keyboard actually isn’t nearly as much as you’d think it would be.