Grandmother, why do you write so quickly?

[pne]

This morning, I was addressing a letter for Stella, and Amy was watching me do so.

While I was writing, she asked me, "Why do you write so quickly?"

She got no response and then asked Stella, "Why is Daddy writing so quickly?". She responded, "Er kann das" (roughly, "He's able to do that, you know" -- not quite the same connotation as "Because he can").

She asked, "Whyyyyy?" (One of her favourite questions.)

So I tried to explain that when I was learning to hand-write in school, I also wrote slowly, but that I've practised a lot over the years, and I got better and faster, and now I'm able to write quickly. I'm not sure whether she understood.

I'm also really fast at typing, but I don't think she will have noticed that :) I'm apparently well-known for that in the company, though.

That, too, is just practice: my first exposure to computers was, I think, the Apple ][e (//e?) in 4th grade, and I've been typing since then. It's not ten-finger typing, but my fingers simply know where the keys are without having to look at them or think about it much. I just think about the letters (or words) I want to type, and they flow from my fingers.

I wonder whether switching to Dvorak would be beneficial, but I think that I can currently type so quickly that it would take a considerable length of time before the benefits (if indeed there are any) would outweight the length of time I'd need to regain my familiarity with the keyboard layout.

(Even such a minor thing as switching to a US keyboard layout would probably slow me down, since although I do a lot of typing in English, I'm used to using a German keyboard layout to do so, where Y and Z are in different positions.)

Comments

[quinctia]

Probably switching to ten-finger typing would speed you up more than changing keyboard layouts at this point.

I used to use some sort of weird amalgam where I only typed with like four or five of my fingers, and I was pretty fast. But, at some point, I just started typing with all of my fingers. I typed quite a bit faster.

And then I had the summer job once, typesetting long legal ads. Now I type like a robot!

The only annoying layout things I've had have been related to the fact that my last couple of computers have been laptops, and some of the less essential buttons are smaller or squished together. Yet, I still use a full-sized keyboard at work without issues. I guess I'm pretty good at adapting to different sizes and locations for the backspace key. XD

[pne.livejournal.com]

Probably switching to ten-finger typing would speed you up more than changing keyboard layouts at this point.

Possibly, but given that the last time I took a test, I scored over 100 wpm I feel no great pressure to improve my typing speed even further.