Touch typing?

[_ghost_]

I learned touch typing in school despite the fact that it was disappearing from the curriculum in most places during the early part of my childhood. The school I went to was private and very old school--mostly for conservative, rejecting modernity kinds of reasons, but it sometimes worked in my favor when public schools stopped teaching a lot of basic skills. So we still had required typing and home economics classes and in-depth grammar lessons all the way through the twelfth grade.

I was taught to type from grades three to six, two or three times a week in the school computer lab, using a combination of two different programs: Mavis Beacon (which was originally released in the 80's; we definitely weren't using the most up-to-date version, but it would've been one from the late 90's or early 00's) and typing.com, which is a much less comprehensive but completely free and browser based version of the same concept. We had these rubber covers to put over the keyboards so we couldn't look at them, and the exercises we were doing varied a lot. Some of them were just strings of random letters, some of them were paragraphs, some were timed, and we were usually graded on our accuracy. We also spent a lot of time practicing with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but the majority of our time while I was in elementary school was spent on typing. In junior high we focused entirely on the Microsoft programs.

A lot of my classmates didn't actually put any effort into this and didn't see the point of continuing to use it outside of class, but the habit ended up sticking for me. These days I don't do it fully accurately; there are a few keys where I use the finger that feels most convenient rather than the one I'm supposed to use, and I've never been good with the numbers or symbols and usually have to look, but for the most part I did end up using the typing skills I learned in school. It's very useful if you ever need to copy something, which I do relatively often because I'm a writer who does all my rough drafts by hand, so I have to be able to transcribe that, and it's a lot easier to do if you don't have to look at the keys. Every so often I test my typing speed just out of curiosity, and I can consistently type about 75-80 words per minute. My accuracy goes down if there are a lot of numbers or symbols involved, and also I'm just bad at spelling anyway, but I feel pretty good about it. It's one of those things that doesn't really matter than much but it still makes me proud of myself; after all, most people my age get along just fine without knowing how to touch type, but I'm still faster. That's cool.

[Junebug]

Yes, I touch type. Recent online test says 77 wpm. I do think it's worth it because it means I can write as quickly as I think of the words. I also use Emacs for my writing, which is most useful when your fingers already know where the keys are located. So I would recommend it to everyone who's on a computer a lot.