"because you’re no longer struggling with the tool at hand."
I saw this coming somewhere around the first paragraph. Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?"
As a parallel, take Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) as a guitar player. Sure, his playing was sloppy as hell when playing live. But the man knew the fret board. He knew all of the places any note could be played, he knew which boxes will allow the riff he wants to play (in fact, I doubt he thought "which box?" but rather "here's where I need to be"), the man was comfortable with his tool and the guitar has the appearance of being an extension of his hand when he plays. He never looks like he's mentally saying "okay, I need an A# next, which is...". This allows him to move on from rote mechanics to making incredible music.
Typing is the same IMO. If you struggle with typing, the first thing you're likely to do is reach for the mouse for anything other than text entry. Which means you reeaach over to the mouse, then mooooove the mouse, click, and...what was it you were doing again? Then when text entry time comes it comes out as "M...y...C...l...a...s...s... ...*...f...o...o". The tool is taking up mental cycles when it should be more of an extension of your thoughts.
It's been argued on HN and elsewhere that typing speed has little bearing on productivity for programming since one spends more time thinking than typing. My counter to that is that the two probably intersect more often than you think they do, and when they do you don't want to be burning cycles figuring out which finger to use to reach the "w" key.
>Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?"
I wouldn't be so sure. I can write and type just fine, but I always learned better in class by listening to the teacher instead of trying to produce a pile of notes. All of the kids I remember that wasted their time writing down everything the teacher said without really listening to them, did just the same with computers or old-fashioned pen and paper.
I always listened best by having my hand do something. So I often wrote (unreadable) notes, doodled around, and made drawings. Never used these notes for anything, but when I was studying afterwards, I could use them as an aid to remember the lectures better: at this doodle of a flying Christmas tree with antlers, the professor explained such or so. Very odd.
> All of the kids I remember that wasted their time writing down everything the teacher said without really listening to them, did just the same with computers or old-fashioned pen and paper.
I was the same way throughout school, but I think the causal relationship might be reversed. The students who take notes almost robotically might just do so because they have poor verbal memory.
One can listen and take notes at the same time. I found that taking notes helped a lot, even though I hardly ever to never reviewed them later. But it helped to strengthen what I was listening to.
The simple takeaway is that different people learn differently. Don't assume what works for you will work for others and vice versa.
I wasn't really trying to judge anyone's preferred method of learning (though I see how I came off that way), just arguing that the "guy who takes tons of notes but learns very little" phenomenon has nothing to do with typing skills. I had a few people in mind from my school days who would practically transcribe each lecture, producing pages of minutes and never putting their pen down for a moment, yet understand less by the end than the stoner in the back who slept through half of it.
> the two probably intersect more often than you think they do
One of the reasons I like more terse, concise languages is because it allows me to get the idea represented quicker, so I spend more time thinking about the problem and solution and less time transcribing the solution.
There is,of course, a downside in legibility, but I believe that's mostly mitigated for people familiar enough with the language.
When is typing speed ever really the bottleneck? Code gets read 100x more often than it gets written, and any editor or IDE worth it's salt can auto-complete faster than you can think anyway.
Typing speed is the bottleneck when you are racing to discharge a thought. It's what the article calls: “transcription fluency”: How quickly and fluidly you can get down — “transcribe” — the stuff that’s in your head. ...you don’t want a bottleneck between the ideas they’re forming and the writing.
What you suggested doesn't address how you get to the final outcome. You suggested: Code gets read 100x more often than it gets written. Well, good code is, bad code isn't. How do you produce good code?
Plus, writing code isn't only about writing but also about deleting; IDEs don't have autodeletion. And typing isn't only about typing. It's also about moving to the place where you want to type.
One thing I want more from IDEs is auto-movement within the same file. Emacs has this to some extent. Pressing Ctrl+<up arrow> jumps up an entire function, because Emacs (in Linux) is cognizant of the barriers of a function [1]. Emacs on Mac OS X doesn't, and it's the #1 productivity killer for me when coding. It takes too long to move. I might stop using Mac OS X precisely because of this [2].
[1] - Or at least whitespace between lines of code or basic blocks.
[2] - I haven't stopped using it, because you can't get a Debian with working wifi on a MacBook Air. So, ironically, typing speed is a bottleneck for me when the OS doesn't have good hardware drivers, and that wasn't an issue with paper and pencil. Things get complicated fast; I hadn't seen that coming.
> Pressing Ctrl+<up arrow> jumps up an entire function, because Emacs (in Linux) is cognizant of the barriers of a function. Emacs on Mac OS X doesn't, and it's the #1 productivity killer for me when coding.
That doesn't sound right. I would urge you to come and talk about in #emacs@freenode if you haven't already!
For me, that auto-complete is useful about a third of the time, and the rest of the time it's like having someone hovering over your shoulder saying "Did you mean ...?" every few keystrokes. If a person did that to me I'd tell them to shut up for a second and wait, and they'll see what I mean as soon as I finish typing it.
So why use a wordy language that makes you read twice as many characters to get the same concepts? It would take a few weeks to learn to read the smaller language, but the rest of your career to gain the benefits. Why write down to the skill of the least skilled member?
If you are looking only to optimize your career and expertise, do whatever you want.
If you care about having a codebase that is accessible to all levels of talent, then you should optimize for readable code. The least skilled team member is still a team member. The fresh grad, the intern, the customer support rep with an interest in code, the new hire. Why are you so willing to discount any of these members as not valuable? Just because they don't have an innate skill and interest in code golf?
Reading symbols is a near instantaneous exercise. You can tell the difference between "i" and "index" with no extra work. Stopping to think to decipher the meaning of cryptic code is slow.
It doesn't hurt to use a full word instead of a single letter variable name, or an explicit function call instead of an alias to some cryptic character. We don't use languages anymore that benefit from have a small file size. Reading will always be more important than writing, until you get down to hardware drivers and kernels.
Oh, I wasn't talking about variable names, those are certainly the fastest to read and communicate the complexities of a domain. I was talking about programming languages that require 3-4x the code/boilerplate to write the same logic. For example, F# usually needs roughly half the lines and way less than half the characters than the equivalent C# code, assuming all the same variable and function names. Other examples are Scala, Haskell, Clojure, Go, or even lambdas and the Linq features of C#. I've heard others argue we shouldn't use these because "jr members won't understand them".
Usually the person arguing this position is not junior, and does not know the feature or language now. Which leads me to believe it has nothing to do with junior members at all, and everything to do with them.
Edit: I also think that writing down to the least skilled member is disrespectful to them and you. It's pandering to treat them as too ignorant or stupid to learn powerful concepts, no matter who they are. I also think most people who make this argument disregard the sheer cliff wall of difficulty that is modern software development. The difference in difficulty between an entire C# stack with inheritance, interfaces, threads, polymorphism, and mutable class state and all that plus lambdas is really minor.
> If you care about having a codebase that is accessible to all levels of talent, then you should optimize for readable code.
"All levels of talent" is such a can of worms. No, not even in a team environment you should have all code accessible to all levels of talent. That's just a recipe failure.
Anyway, that isn't really relevant to the argument of how many characters you should use in a variable name.
You can have the best of both world with an IDE with good autocomplete where you only have to type a few characters and hit tab most of the time, resulting in less time typing and improved legibility.
What experience are you basing that on? That has never happened to me. It shows you what it's going to put in before it puts it in and gives you a drop-down menu.
Well, that's correcting the choice, only before its applied, what has little impact on how much attention the IDE grabs from you.
I've had both before and after application errors, on different IDEs and different codebases (some sets of names change the probability distribution). But Visual Studio seems to be the worst ofender, stealing not only the up and down arrows for navigation, but also open parentesis, space, enter, period, and colon, for application... and I'm sure I forgot some keys.
> If you struggle with typing, the first thing you're likely to do is reach for the mouse for anything other than text entry. Which means you reeaach over to the mouse, then mooooove the mouse, click, and...what was it you were doing again?
The same thoughtless action that comes from using a familiar tool for expression can carry over to any tool, including the mouse. I don't think about the keys or where my fingers are in relation to the keyboard when I'm typing this--the thoughts just go from my head straight to the text box where my eyes corroborate what my brain is thinking. But the same can be said for when I'm browsing the web and I move my hand to the mouse and scroll down... I don't think about it, it just happens. My brain thinks, "I wonder what's further down the page" and my body responds accordingly.
That said, there's much to be said for the efficiency of a keyboard. A few months ago I installed the Vimium Chrome extension and I've been trying to get myself to use the keyboard for scrolling down and clicking links. It's hard. My brain instinctively (still, after months) tells my hand to move to the mouse. I often need to take my hand off the mouse and go back to the keyboard to force myself to use the keyboard shortcuts.
The same is true with reading code: if your brain has no association with curly braces, you're not going to be able to scan a chunk of code and intuitively separate code within curly braces from code outside the curly braces.
So there's more to it all than just the difficulty or familiarity with the tools. It's also about skill and habits.
If you are worried about typing speed slowing down your coding, I would assume that your code is not very well thought through in the first place. When I was at university a while ago, we were told to go and write the algorithm down on paper before coding it - a practice I find way more helpful today than any unit testing framework.
The niggley little things that cause syntax errors are likely to cause an order of magnitude more mental effort than trying to find a key. Or a crap algorithm because you dived straight into the code.
As a side note, many terminals have tab completion and most IDE's have something similar. I can't touch type, but I don't think I need to in this day and age. And I go pretty fast. So much of your argument is irrelevant for developers.
I think you're assuming that because people can't type that that implies they don't remember where the keys are located. People who can't type simply have developed different muscle memory, which is probably less efficient than typing. However, as many people have explained, it's not such a big deal. There has been code completion, in some form, for decades: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HippieExpand
Also, consider that people seldom type "M...y...C...l...a...s...s", they type My<TAB>
I agree completely. I've always found that listening and transcribing are mutually exclusive. In university taking comprehensive notes were often helpful, but I would usually not know what had been discussed in the class until I re-read the notes later.
I skimmed the study, and that statistic is a little misleading.
They weren't typing predetermined sentences. They were instructed to come up with a story based on some pictures and write it down. They weren't bottlenecked by typing speed, but rather by pauses for thought between words.
This is why I hate these sorts of "X proven better than Y" posts. In this case, the study is available, so you can call the blogger on his BS. In many cases, the actual study is paywalled or not even linked to, leading to all sorts of misinformation.
I can type that fast on a phone. I'll assume for the sake of discussion that this number is accurate across a general population. If you sit at a keyboard long enough, how can you not get faster than 12.2 wpm? So much for "kids growing up with computers". All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed?
OTOH, do typing classes even exist anymore, are are we to assume that kids will just learn it by osmosis? When I was in high school I took typing class. On a real typewriter. And it was a manual typewriter...that we could only use in a blinding snow storm while walking uphill. Anyway, I type around 100 wpm now which I attribute to that typing class. Had I just been left to my own devices to hunt-and-peck my way around, I doubt I'd be anywhere near that speed.
We all can probably stand to use more remedial training at typing, even if we think that we're already pretty fast. Every once in a while I'll dust off [GNU Typist][0] and bash it at for ten-minutes. Unfortunately, its been nearly impossible to change kinetic memory for alternative layouts like [Workman][1], there hasn't been enough time to unlearn and learn it without suffering a huge productivity hit.
All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed?
You mean, "all that time in front of a keyboard - and mouse." GUIs and mouses (and now, touch screens) have made computer interaction largely keyboardless - most people would rather push the rodent around or touch the screen than make use of keyboard shortcuts, and interfaces are designed in that direction so it's not so surprising that people aren't learning how to type faster despite increased computer use.
"which I attribute to that typing class. Had I just been left to my own devices to hunt-and-peck my way around"
I learned on a manual as well. But by using a book. It took about 3 weeks. I actually stopped at the part where you practice numbers (and regret it to this day).
"that we could only use in a blinding snow storm while walking uphill"
I was lucky to be able to convince a college instructor to allow me to bring in the manual typewriter so I could type the answer to an essay instead of using one of the blue books. Same blinding snow storm that day!
> I actually stopped at the part where you practice numbers (and regret it to this day).
We learned that in typing class, but I never did "get" the number row. Bane of my existence to this day. I mean, mostly hit what I want but it's not thoughtless tapping like the rest of the keyboard. Don't know if it's my dainty little fingers or what the deal is.
> Same blinding snow storm that day!
Nah, probably not the same storm. Blinding snow storms were so common back then, it just seemed like it we shared the same weather pattern. Not like the constantly pleasant weather these kids today grow up with.
The statistic about typing classes is indeed a sad one. You make an excellent point: "All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed?"
Unfortunately, in my experience, yes. I spent years using a computer doing virtually everything with it including programming before I finally got fed up with not being able to touch type. I forced myself to not look at the keys and type. It worked. (How could it not?) Later on, I had a typing class as well, but by that time I was already an excellent typist. For the kids that are less motivated however, I think they'd be stuck where I was before I decided to force myself to learn it. Since typing classes are so rare, this means that they won't even be forced to learn it (a good thing).
I don't think anyone is truly computer literate unless they can touch type. It's an essential skill, really, and while one can get by without it, the experience is hardly equivalent. So I wonder, with all the focus on CS classes in high schools, where is the focus on typing? After all, call me prejudiced, but I would never work with a programmer or writer who couldn't touch type. To me, that shows disdain or lack of interest for the profession.
In contrast, I was given typing classes from first grade, for at least one semester per year, every year up until graduation (2007), and I still managed to avoid learning how to touch type for all that time. When I was 18 I decided I wanted to be a coder and found that my typing speed was a lousy 19-25wpm, and decided to get better. It took about a month of active practice to get up to my current plateau of about 60-70wpm. And it was entirely my own choice to learn - the years of classes didn't seem to have any effect.
Edit for vanity: 60-70wpm tested. I'm pretty sure I can type faster than that sometimes.
Hey, I'm another person whose only class was on a manual typewriter. 7th grade, 1992ish. I'm at 85 wpm 100% accuracy, 130 wpm if I omit capitalization and punctuation. (and let the word processor pick it up)
1992?! Holy smokes, and here I thought I went to a backwater school (and I did) because we were still using manual typewriters in 1980. :-) They upgraded to electrics a year or two later.
i spent a lot of time on the net (irc) as a kid, and even then my typing didn't go above 50wpm until i actually sat down and taught myself how to type correctly, and then practiced deliberately. i remember i went from 40wpm to 100wpm in a single summer.
most people never actually learn to type correctly, they just keep doing the wrong thing forever. of course, once you actually learn to do it right, you're practicing all the time and after several years you can easily get up to and past 120wpm if you sit in front of a computer all day.
I don't know how fast my middle-school daughter can type, but she doesn't touch-type. Her school does insist that they spend a lot of time using computers for research and writing, and they even take some standardized tests on computers, but they do not teach the kids how to type. Seems to me if you are going to have the kids using computers, then typing should be an early skill to teach them as well.
On the flip side, I can see that for kids these days it must be much harder to learn to type. So much of their time is spent using computers, and so even spending an hour a day on touch-typing lessons is going to pale in comparison to the amount of time spent not touch typing because you don't know enough yet to touch type all the time. And that has to make the barrier much harder to overcome.
> Her school does insist that they spend a lot of time using computers for research and writing, and they even take some standardized tests on computers, but they do not teach the kids how to type. (emphasis mine)
That's just asinine. When I was in high school 30 years ago, if a school had insisted that all reports be typewritten and yet did not offer typing classes, I'm pretty sure some job losses would have occurred. What other tools shall we insist that children use without instruction? Hand them pencils in 1st grade and demand that they produce legible communication that they're left to just figure out on their own? Here's a band saw for shop class, have a bookshelf done by end of day?
That seems ridiculous. They were having us do things like reader rabbit 15 years ago in elementary school. By middle school I was already typing at 80 wpm which unfortunately was faster than the fastest speeds for most of the typing games they were having us do at the times.
Granted I'd imagine this could be a problem with funding for computers in certain areas, but I'd at least expect them to have typing classes early on if they are also expecting you to work with computers in other classes. This is one of those skills that is very beneficial to start on early.
My father types nearly every day and can barely do 20 wpm.
You could find one of those online typing tutors for her. Why rely on the school for this, if they let you down you can just go around that using the web.
Really? I don't find it that shocking at all that most people might type at a tenth of the speed a programmer can type. I'm sure a chef could express the same awe at my inefficiency when making Kraft Dinner.
I was a college student during this time. I feel like people my age all ended up proficient at typing because of instant messenging (not just the "computer guys"). It was my preferred mode of communication of in high school (especially since this was pre-smartphone). I'm definitely surprised that they found typing speeds that slow.
> I feel like people my age all ended up proficient at typing because of instant messenging (not just the "computer guys").
Same here. I drastically improved my typing speed thanks to internet chat rooms. My parents first got home internet when I was in high school in the late 90s, and my typing speed went from ~28wpm (thanks to a 6-week 9th grade typing class) to 60+ wpm in a week, after spending only an hour or so online each day. I had to type at least that fast to keep up with the conversation, so my brain was forced to acclimate.
Realistically I don't think programmers type prose all that much more frequently than college students. Programming tends to involve lots of symbols, and most of the typing is in small edits rather than paragraphs. College students write long essays and term papers, whereas I rarely write anything longer than an in-depth comment on Hacker News. I agree that it makes sense that programmers type faster due to the general correlation with technology usage, but I'm still quite surprised by the magnitude of the difference.
Yeah, I think people tend to make assumptions about the competence of others with regards to the tools that they personally are so adept at using that the action has become mostly subconscious.
I do it myself all of the time. It seems to be the result of the way our minds make associations, and an inability to properly 'empathize' with others, that is, to view the action from their perspective of being relatively unpracticed at it. This is where, in fact, I think a large part of 'imposter syndrome' stems from.
I personally have difficulty viewing the ability to launch/maintain web applications, provision a server for deployment, write SQL queries, etc, etc, etc... as anything particularly 'novel' or requiring ability; and indeed, in the context of this web-site, it isn't.
In the real world though, there's a dearth of 'incompetence', but unless you actively interact with a menagerie/distributed-sampling of society, it is very easy to convince yourself that the average person is as competent/intelligent as the people you surround yourself with on a daily basis. The fact that the internet allows everyone in your field to collaborate only serves to exacerbate the situation.
These are not "most people", these are college students. If you can't write an essay at a reasonable pace (and don't have an excuse like studying pure math -- by your own admission computer science is out) -- it would appear basic education has failed. Not that that's much of a surprise -- the only reason I'm not hobbled by poor, self-taught, typing is that I was offered touch typing (on a typewriter, mind) in junior high school.
I suppose it's testament that for all the fun of being an autodidact, there are some skills that really do benefit from tutoring (I'd argue most skills do, but the challenge is to find a good tutor...).
Obviously the most important is how well one writes, not the speed.
But 12 wpm is basically a real handicap -- it is below reasonable speed. Consider that a short essay is maybe 10 pages, and needs a minimum of three drafts... that's 25 pages or so. 8-12 hours of just typing for 10 pages?
I like that the OP references the NYT piece on how handwriting had cognitive benefits...I guess I didn't read that NYT piece as presenting a dichotomy, only asserting that handwriting had its own cognitive benefits independent of how fast you could produce content. In fact, when I'm stuck in a problem-solving bind, I'll sometimes sketch charts/tables on paper, even though I almost always immediately throw the paper away.
That said, I wholly agree with the OP that speed in production unlocks its own benefits. Working with novice coders, I've become acutely sensitive to how much lack of keyboard-shortcutting can hamper a novice's ability to understand code, especially across a project. The 5 to 10 seconds it takes for them to hunt-and-click for a file among Sublime Text tabs is enough for them to forget what bug they were trying to fix in the first place.
If I had to run a learn-to-code bootcamp...I think the first thing I would do is to remove the lab computers' default mouse input and replace them with the 80s-era steel-ball mice until students realized that using a mouse should be the edge case.
"I think the first thing I would do is to remove the lab computers' default mouse input and replace them with the 80s-era steel-ball mice until students realized that using a mouse should be the edge case."
I'd fire you immediately if you did that. The mouse is not an edge case.
This is definite check-your-privilege/assumptions territory for me. Reading the headline alone, I assumed this was going to be some sort of "you should slow down, zen out, and think more clearly, by not typing so fast" post. The idea of 60 wpm as being fast took me a while to grasp.
I think those kids wrote longer and better essays also because when typing you know you can edit, insert or remove whatever part whenever you want. This I believe also makes the person less thoughtful about what he writes for the first time. Contrary to writing, when you need to visualize the whole essay first and then start writing. Which is much more difficult. So the result, ie typing gave better result can also be because of the flexibility to modify any part of the content. What if no edits were alloyed while typing ? does that change the outcome ?
While writing essays or quick replies, typing can be better both because of its transcription fluency and flexibility in editing (iterative style of writing).
But in note taking, one needs another kind of flexibility. Like ability to change the handwriting or write in any direction anywhere. How many times we write illegible words, just to getaway with it and focus on the knowledge while in classroom. Also while pondering on an idea, we need this flexibility. We don't get this in typing. Only if we could scribble while typing (something to solve) ....
Writing is certainly loosing its territory to typing. Emails replaced letters, editing softwares, etc. But IMO once touch screen computers and tablet takes over. We might see people preferring stylus pens and resort back to writing. But Graphite is still going to loose.. :)
I'm not sold on typing per se, but mastering an appropriate output method for your domain seems key. For programming, that is typing. For math, it could be either manuscript or TeX. For the humanities it could be either manuscript or typing. Typing always removes a transcription step, but that is unlikely to be the limiting factor for any deep knowledge work.
As a homeschool dad, I think it is important to get kids to a relative level of proficiency as quickly as possible. Difficulty writing or typing or whatever certainly limits output. Different kids will prefer different options and thats fine.
PS. Even if typing is faster, writing allows more free form expression(maps/diagrams/etc) and that may mitigate the speed issue.
Does it matter? I think faster than I type, but a lot of what I think is jumbled garbage. Why on earth would I want to barf that onto the screen?
I think perhaps 2x as fast as I type, which gives me time to consider what or how I want to say something, without constraining me to the choking snail's pace that is, for example, T-9.
FWIW the article's test pegs me at 95wpm; extended tests with sneaky words usually clock me around 75wpm.
(When I meet a word I can't spell instantly, I have to transcribe the letters rather than the word, which is slower)
Don't know. My hope would be that if I could get more of my thoughts down faster, I would have more time to prune and generally edit what I wrote.
In general, I think there has to be advantages to be a bit more in step with how you are thinking and how you are typing. That is, if I am constantly interrupting my typing thoughts with my actual thoughts, and vice versa, I will go slower.
Probably matters a lot as to how you personally think. I am not a visual person, so I rarely "see" what it is I am thinking. The words are essential to my understanding some things. So, having two thought processes going both involving words is very difficult if one is constantly thrashing the other.
I average 140wpm without any "advanced typing techniques", so I don't think they're really necessary. I can't speak to whether or not they would be helpful, though. I do think it's very worthwhile to be able to type this fast - people speak somewhere around 150wpm on average, and being able to type as fast as you speak is useful for instant messaging, etc.
That's a bit different. Court stenographers, along with the people who do real-time TV captions, use specialized chording keyboards (stenographs, they look like this [0]) that allow them to type words or even whole phrases with a single or just a few strokes. That's how they're fast - you can only go so far typing one letter at a time.
Right, I thought I had read you could actually enable some of the chording techniques on a standard keyboard at some time. Though, I don't recall the story. Quickly googling isn't showing too much.
Regardless, I know I could get faster than I am. I hover just over 80 to 90. To get a lot faster, I was always under the impression that I would need something like that. I have also always thought that I have no need for that. So it works out. :)
With n-key rollover, you can use Plover to mimic stenotype chording on typical qwerty. It's been posted/discussed here a few times, so that might be what you're thinking of.
I developed speed from text MUDs. I'm the type of person who dislikes customizing my setup and prefer to play straight; as a result, I had to consume, digest, and react to pretty large quantities of barely-differentiated text in tenths of a second.
At some point I just sat down and did some deliberate practice. I'm actually still not as good at typing as I would like to be, I have some glitches like only using my right thumb for the spacebar and sometimes using the wrong Shift key. There are a lot of programs out there that will help you do deliberate practice, it's just a matter of putting in some time.
> 60 words a minute is still very slow, when it comes to thinking speed.
Well, undoubtedly... Although I don't think you can apply a 'word per minute' count to thought in any accurate manner.
After all, words are just a medium; an abstraction that we're using to convey an underlying meaning, even if we internally represent those ideas with a series of other words/abstractions/ideas I don't think you could necessarily measure 'thought speed' by attempting to enumerate those 'words'.
I have to agree, 60 WPM is pretty slow. Even at 130 WPM I still struggle to keep up with my thoughts sometimes. I don't use any special technique/layout because I find 130 to be pretty proficient, but I'm sure using dvorak or some other odd layout would improve speed after the initial learning curve.
I have the opposite problem. I hover around 60 WPM when transcribing or copying, but I often pause mid-sentence or mid-paragraph to gather my thoughts for what to say next (probably more like how to word it correctly) when writing original content.
Maybe it's a lack of discipline or practice and I'd be able to form thoughts more quickly if I were required to, or maybe I can form thoughts quickly but my typing doesn't keep up and I lose track. That said, I do the stop-to-gather-thoughts thing when I speak as well so maybe I'm hopeless.
So, for me it is that I can not really decide "what to say next" until I have gotten "what I'm saying now" out of my head and onto the screen.
That is, if I can keep an even pace where I'm typing at roughly the speed I'm saying what I want to type, then I don't do this stutter that often. However, if I am constantly getting adrift in how fast I'm typing versus how far ahead I've thought of what to say, then I stutter like crazy.
I'm assuming it has a lot to do with how you "speak" in your head. Some people (myself) do so verbally. Some do so visually.
I normally type somewhere in the region of 85-105 depending on the app, and I was only getting 85 on the app embedded in that page. It has a slightly higher frequency of long words than most colloquial speech, typical of discussion fora like this one.
Back in college, I dictated the bulk of my (humanities) papers using Windows Vista’s built-in speech recognition. It unlocked a new paradigm of revising where I could speak an entire paragraph, delete it without hesitation, and re-write, all in a minute’s time. Including pauses and corrections, I probably got less than 100 WPM. That alone isn't impressive, but it came with minimal fatigue and friction. It was very liberating to edit my logic and reasoning at a multi-sentence level.
Sure, deleting is fast, but I meant that typing something back isn't. Speaking makes it faster and easier to start over with multiple sentences until one works. Maybe it's just laziness -- when typing, I am more hesitant to redo entire paragraphs. When typing, I also feel more caught up in the details and words inside my sentences. (Though that may not be a bad thing!)
I think I have found the absolute worst typing test[1] on the Internet thanks to this article. It keeps a timer running until you "hit tab and click stop". You're telling me that I need to stop tying, move my hand over to my mouse, dragm the mouse button to that "stop" button and click the button? That'll lose me typing time...
I can certainly type sixty words a minute, but when it comes to retention there's no comparison between typing and handwriting for me and I don't find myself transcribing.
I have a notion that the permanence and chunkiness of writing keeps thoughts 'whole' whereas the ease of backspacing allows the same words to become abstracted. I'll have to try typing with backspace mapped to newline or something to see how the idea plays out.
This is especially interesting to me. I've been relearning how to type on an Alphagrip and for much of the process (20-50wpm) I have felt like it was dumbing me down because my thoughts all have to wait for me to slowly output them. Now that I'm past 50wpm on alpha text the effect isn't as bad, but I still feel hindered. (But.... that's worth it for not exacerbating carpal tunnel issues, right?)
Btw, I would recommend this (learning a new keyboard layout) as a refreshing exercise for anyone who has forgotten what the learning process feels like. I imagine trying to read a book in another language is similar.
Unless you're a professional typist, 40 wpm as an average speed is definitely OK.
Realistically there are few people that average over 120 wpm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute).
As far as schools go, I hope they stick to using pens, as I don't know anyone who got RSI after using one.
I cleaned my keyboard and ended up swapping two keys because of their proximity to the keyboard when I reset their positions. A co-worker mistyped one of the keys, then backspaced, then typed it again and on several other places on the same line before stopping, looking confused, then staring at the keyboard asking "You swapped your keys?"
"""One of the reasons we formally teach handwriting to young children is that you don’t want a bottleneck between the ideas they’re forming and the writing. """
Talking with my son's teachers and pediatricians, one big reason that early classes emphasize writing is not just about literacy, but rather about developing hand muscles.
Seems like GNU Typist is quite popular in this thread. I was wondering how do you learn to use right fingers for right buttons. I could use GNU Typist but I might just be practicing with wrongs fingers.
I think there's also much to be said about the "standard" way of teaching typing, which I find to be excessively constraining and inefficient [1]. Instead of forcing a strict "one key, one finger" correspondence, it's better to teach where the keys are, and to encourage the use of as many fingers as possible. It's also not explicitly taught, but the skill of breaking up sequences of letters so that you're typing complete words and common pieces of words (e.g. "ing") is also very important. Fast, fluent typing comes from being able to quickly know which keys to hit for a given word - which finger exactly to use matters only tangentially. I've seen people type 100+ wpm with only 2 fingers on each hand, but they know which keys to hit, and know where the next key they need to hit is.
I saw this coming somewhere around the first paragraph. Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?"
As a parallel, take Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) as a guitar player. Sure, his playing was sloppy as hell when playing live. But the man knew the fret board. He knew all of the places any note could be played, he knew which boxes will allow the riff he wants to play (in fact, I doubt he thought "which box?" but rather "here's where I need to be"), the man was comfortable with his tool and the guitar has the appearance of being an extension of his hand when he plays. He never looks like he's mentally saying "okay, I need an A# next, which is...". This allows him to move on from rote mechanics to making incredible music.
Typing is the same IMO. If you struggle with typing, the first thing you're likely to do is reach for the mouse for anything other than text entry. Which means you reeaach over to the mouse, then mooooove the mouse, click, and...what was it you were doing again? Then when text entry time comes it comes out as "M...y...C...l...a...s...s... ...*...f...o...o". The tool is taking up mental cycles when it should be more of an extension of your thoughts.
It's been argued on HN and elsewhere that typing speed has little bearing on productivity for programming since one spends more time thinking than typing. My counter to that is that the two probably intersect more often than you think they do, and when they do you don't want to be burning cycles figuring out which finger to use to reach the "w" key.