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

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

Yeah, half the time I'm incapable of typing "though" because it always turns into "thought." There's another couple that I autocomplete (I like that term!) but I can't remember them offhand.

I'm a fast typer because I had to take a typing class for a quarter in 6th grade. Between that, and playing MUDs for years, I have a 100+ wpm speed. There was this MUD called Federation I used to play 1994-1995 or so, and one of the things you could do is transport goods from planet to planet for higher-level players. I remember a couple times people thought I was using a bot/macro because I swept across the galaxy so quickly.