My Regret
This post will take me a very long time to type because instead of using only two fingers, I'm using all ten. See? Just typing that sentence took me about ten minutes! (I could also attribute it to the fact that I haven't had coffee yet, but won't...)
Last night I bought a gizmo that raises my laptop up and pretty much forces me to type while looking straight ahead (otherwise defeating the purpose and wasting money), so I finally decided that it's time that I stop this insanely fast two-finger stuff and learn to type like a real writer.
(Yeah, I know that many ''real writers" are two finger typers, but let's not muddle this!)
Unlike my own kids, I was neither forced, nor even really encouraged, to learn to type. In third grade, when my own kids were taught keyboarding, I was handwriting sentence after sentence from the red Zaner-Bloser booklet, dipping my j's with just the right flair and dotting my i's with just a hint if a curly-que, in anticipation of being 14.
By the time I was a senior in high school and I had gotten the "important" classes out of the way, I finally had time to take typing -- except that typing was offered only first period and I didn't have another class until 4th period. And because sleep was vastly more important than a class I surely wouldn't need because I wasn't going to be a secretary, I dropped typing after a few short weeks.
Ah, how times have changed, and oh how I wish that I had taken typing!
Somehow I got through college and a 20-something year career without ever learning to type with all ten fingers, and with no one ever complaining that I typed too slowly. But this is ridiculous! I mean really!
So see that colorful print-out taped to my desk? That's my teacher until I learn to type with all ten fingers and without looking at the keyboard!
I have a feeling it's going to be a long day...
8 comments:
Better late than never... I remain grateful to my mother that she made me learn when i was so young.
Good luck!
I love 10 finger typing, but I still even after all these years, cannot do the diacriticals and numbers confidently. We had to learn on oldfashioned Typewriters with unlabeled keys and were not allowed to backspace and typeover-- what a luxury it is to have the backspace key on a computer!!
But now there are added complications-- I have to type in American, German, French, and British, and the keyboard layouts are completely different. I was just now wrestling with the problem of finding the English pound sign £ on my keyboard: not an easy assignment.
But I think it is great that you are learning it now!
My next goal is learning chinese. Couldn't be much more difficult than touchtyping. After all, I saw even infants speaking perfect Chinese last week!
I type very fast, thanks to working in a law firm in my early twenties transcribing legal transcripts. I hated that job with a white hot passion, but it did wonders for my typing skills. Still, I'm not nearly as fast as my husband, who has been programming for 25 years. His fingers are a blur when he types.
My oldest (13) is taking keyboarding this year, and is amazed by how much easier it is to write reports and such now that he can type properly.
Good luck. I bet it will come very fast and easy. It's really very cleverly arranged and your fingers will learn the rhythyms very quickly.
That was one of the things I did right as a parent, I made my boys take typing. They were the only boys in their classes and took a lot of teasing. Later, in college, they were awfully glad I forced them into it.
Carol, you do so many things beautifully, you'll get there quickly. ;-) And it's so much easier once you get that down.
BTW... the Writing Game is up and running again - wanna play? I'd LOVE to have you!
Yup that Qwerty keyboard is a bit hard to learn but I'm sure you'll get it down pat soon. Good luck...ciao
Yep...taking typing class in high school was one of the best decisions I made in my life. You know there are a bunch of free touch typing tutorials on the internet to help you practice and get your speed up. I go looking for them now and then to see how much speed I've lost over the years. I used to type 133 words a minute when I was at peak form.
I'm quite happy that touch typing was offered at my American high school. In fact will go out on a limb and say that it is one of the few things I took away from my education which has been consistently used in my daily life.
What is fascinating is that I work side by side with many Germans that never learned to touch type! You would think that they would relish the efficiency of typing 100+ words per minute. I have yet to meet ONE German that learned how to touch type in school, they say that it was simply never offered to them. How sad.
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