typewriting

[Rick F]

Yep, I agree with you Joe. It's a good skill to have and use for the rest of your life.

My mother forced me to take 'personal typing' in H.S too (early 60s), and I got up to maybe 40 or 45 words a minute by the end of the course (only a 1-semester course). I had no intention of ever being a secretary -- but typing skills came in handy with my job with the advent of computers.

My wife and I insisted that our two sons also take typing in H.S. It has been a good skill for them as well as both of them are engineers.

[LoyalTubist]

I was a secretarial major in high school.

Yes. You read that correctly. I took three years of typing, shorthand, steno, and office practice classes. When I type, whether one of those old word processors, even older typewriters, or my iBook, I don't know any other way to type but the correct way. I never have to look at my hands.

This isn't to brag. I paid my dues. I think I can still type over 100 words a minute (down from the 155 words I did in the eleventh grade!)

These skills have been especially helpful when I was in between jobs. When you are the only man out of nearly 175 applicants (and you can type quickly and accurately) you have a considerable edge, especially if they subscribe to affirmative action.

Men are a minority when it comes to hiring executive secretaries.

[gwwilk]

I couldn't agree more, Joe. I went to high school in the late 1950's, and my two semester typing class enrollment was in those days unusual. I was in what was back then a mostly female class because I knew my atrocious handwriting was going to be a tremendous handicap unless I could communicate quickly and easily via the typewritten word.

One of my purchases as I left home for college was a used portable Smith-Corona typewriter. That little tool was essential to my successful negotiation of college and then medical school. And because I could type fairly fast (40-60 wpm) I wasn't afraid to jump early onto the computer bandwagon. My first computer was purchased in 1978. It had an S100 bus, 64Kb of RAM, an 8088 CPU, two 5 1/4" internal and two 8" external floppy drives, a serial monochrome terminal with an integrated keyboard, and printed via an NEC Thimblewriter. All of this was held together by CPM, the operating system which was plagiarized by some people who then sold their OS to Bill Gates AFTER he had agreed to supply IBM with an operating system for their PC. So when the IBM PC came out in 1981, I was underwhelmed.

Fast forward to today. I have been using an electronic medical record for over a year now. Keyboarding is now an essential skill for doing my day to day work, instead of just being an entertaining hobby. I enter my patient's story into their record as they relate it to me. I will usually distill it down to the essential elements, read it back to them, and seek their agreement on what the record says. I almost always have their entire record for the current visit finished before they leave the exam room, so they also get an idea of what their diagnosis is before they leave. There is no way this would be possible without my ability to keyboard fairly quickly.

All of my adult life I have been an advocate of EVERYONE taking typing or keyboarding as soon as it is offered in school. Hopefully my encouragement has helped some wavering students acquire this esential skill. So for anyone reading this, if you can't type very well but have an opportunity to learn, DO IT. Huntin' and peckin' just won't cut it in today's world.

[dopey]

I agree. At first glance I thought you were talking about getting the old typewriter out the closet and learning using it!

Where I work depends on my ability to type quickly and accurately, I can finally say all that chatting and computer games in my younger day did pay off for something!

[TubaRay]

It would be nice to take a class to get a few things organized so that maybe I COULD type much more goodlier. It would bring much happy.

Didn't you mean to say it this way? "I could type much more gooder. It would bring much more happier."

[Doug@GT]

Typing was the only useful class I took in High School.

[OldsRecording]

[quote="bloke"]
Today, I can type about as fast as, let's say, a person with a stuttering problem can talk.
quote]

(ahem...) I resemble that remark Yes, I have a wee bit of a speech impediment, but I can talk pretty damn fast if I have too I took typing in high school too, but I never got all that good at it, although I'm not so bad at using the 'chopsticks' method.

[Rick F]

You know, there are free online typing tutors out there. I remember we had a 'Typing Tutor' program when we had our first computer (Apple-IIe). Now they're free online.

Here's one if interested:
http://www.typingtutor.org/

I just took a test on their site. It seems I've gotten faster than I was in H.S. 58 w/minute with 3 mistakes... which gave me a score of 55 I think.

[windshieldbug]

OK, dissenting view. Even though I took typing in high school, like many other people, I didn't take the opportunity to learn what would be a very useful skill.

Fast forward a few years. I found that hunting and pecking actually made me a better coder. For one, I had time to think about it as I searched for the keys (presuming one IS thinking about it). For another, I got very good at cutting and pasting, which again improved my accuracy.

The bizarre thing about a QWERTY keyboard is that they were not originally designed for speed, rather, they were designed to slow people down because they became too fast for the mechanical keyboard mechanisms of analog keyboards.

And god help us if we redesigned THAT!

[gwwilk]

OK, dissenting view. Even though I took typing in high school, like many other people, I didn't take the opportunity to learn what would be a very useful skill.

Fast forward a few years. I found that hunting and pecking actually made me a better coder. For one, I had time to think about it as I searched for the keys (presuming one IS thinking about it). For another, I got very good at cutting and pasting, which again improved my accuracy.

But at least you had a choice. I'm puzzled, because once you learn the keyboard fingerings, you've gotta be some kind of stubborn to go back to two fingers everywhere. It's like playing your tuba with your index finger moving to whatever valve is the first one to be depressed. That's dysfunctional, IMHO.

[windshieldbug]

I'm puzzled, because once you learn the keyboard fingerings, you've gotta be some kind of stubborn to go back to two fingers everywhere.

What I was trying to say (poorly, obviously) was that I "learned" it well enough for the tests, forgot it, and then found out years later that it was actually useful for something besides typing business letters.

It's like playing your tuba with your index finger moving to whatever valve is the first one to be depressed.

That's pretty much exactly how it feels to learn a new key of tuba. Depressed.

[iiipopes]

And speaking of typewriter, this year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Leroy Anderson. the Missouri State University Community Band is programming a lot of his works this season and next spring, including, yes, the Typewriter. Of all the people in concert band, I'm the only one who was able to drag a real manual typewriter out that actually works, an old Smith-Corona portable, for the band to use. When my uncle got Parkinson's and couldn't type his own rough drafts of his legal briefs anymore, he gave it to me so my son would know what came before personal computers. On that typewriter has been typed many important legal papers, including the rough draft of the brief he argued in a case to the US Supreme Court in 1973.

Second item: when I was in high school and took a semester of typing, the typewriters we used were Royal electrics, old then (1978-9), and were the same model my dad had in his office that his secretary typed his briefs on. I missed the 50wpm award by one mistake, and ran out of time at the end of the semester to try again, as the teacher only held tryouts at certain times, and I had other finals to study for. When I'm having a good day, I can still type, albeit on a computer keyboard now, faster than the other secretaries at my uncle's firm specifically trained as such.

[Rick F]

The bizarre thing about a QWERTY keyboard is that they were not originally designed for speed, rather, they were designed to slow people down because they became too fast for the mechanical keyboard mechanisms of analog keyboards.

Well that's not exactly true. The keys were arranged this way (QWERTY layout) so that the most often used letters wouldn't collide with each other and jam when typing fast. Remember, the old typewriters had the letters mounted on these long arms... not the spinning ball that IBM invented in the 60's.



Once you learned how to 'touch type', you could actually type faster because the most often used letters were more spread out. See this link on 'QWERTY' if interested:
http://www.maxmon.com/1874ad.htm

[Rick Denney]

I DID NOT learn to type in high school.

Or college.

When I started work, reports were written long-hand on yellow pads and handed to typists. In our office at the Texas Highway Department, we got a new typewriter/word processor that was a successor to the original Lanier system but a predecessor to the use of desktop computers for typing. That freed up the Selectric that our secretary had been using.

So, I moved it into my office and started using it.

My boss, in the next office, soon became frustrated listening to "kerchunk..............kerchunk..............kerchunk.........kerchunk-- DAMMIT!" and suggested that we had people who could do the typing for me. But at that time, it was apparent to me that there would be two kinds of engineers in the future, those who could effectively enter information into computers and those who were unemployed.

Now, I type about 75 words a minute according to the old ways of measuring it. Since I do not type what is already written down (like typists once did), and instead type out of my head, it makes no sense to type faster than I think, and 75 words/minute already exceeds that slow pace by a goodly margin.

Now, at a Selectric (if I could find one), those in the next office would hear, "ke-k-k-k-k-k-k-kerch-k-k-kk-k--DAMMIT!"

Rick "who NEEDS that backspace key" Denney

[TMurphy]

Let me start off by saying that I do not actually type correctly. I am an index-finger typer all the way. But, after having taken that online typing test, I found I can type 65 wpm with no mistakes. And no, I do not need to look at the keys while I type.

I do wish I had taken some sort of typing class, though. Given how fast I can type with just two fingers, I imagine (after the inital slowing down) I could probably increase my typing speed to about 100 wpm.