The school computer lab has clunky greige Apple computers loaded with Mavis Beacon software. It’s 1995, and I’m in seventh-grade keyboarding class. We practice placing our fingers on the “home row”: the left hand on ASDF, right on JKL;.
Health class:
This goes on once a week for three months
Bilateral pallidal deep brain stimulation is a neurosurgery used to treat Parkinson’s disease
small electrodes are inserted into an area of the brain that controls motor function, then a separate device is implanted in the chest that sends electrical impulses into the brain to regulate movements.
The act of typing – either fluid touch typing or making mistakes – is a miracle of our brains
1 in 10 searches on Google has some sort of error
- About 10% of all searches have some error or typo
- Automatically, Google stops misspelled and typo’d searches before they happen: the autosuggest box
- Google also has to take into account misspellings and phonetic spellings
- Deep learning and neural networks are able to use context to parse human folly
People who choose to enter speed typing competitions are a bit on the nerdy side
Das Keyboard is the founder of Das Keyboard, a mechanical keyboard manufacturer
- The fastest typists also use computers a lot
- Most of the other top typists don’t use the home row
- Brandon Vielle, who tied for fifth in 2020, also has his own technique
- Emre Aydin from the UK didn’t have typing classes in his school
- He does not do traditional touch typing
- Did not learn to type from anyone in a class
QWERTY was invented before touch typing or the home row method was
It’s basically just based on the first half of the alphabet that doesn’t make any sense
- Additionally, home row does not support the anatomy of the human hand, where the middle three fingers on each hand want to stretch further than the pinkies and the thumbs do
- By forcing your longer fingers onto the Home row, you’re creating needless friction that will probably slow you down too
The Future of Typing
Maybe the new frontier of typing isn’t typing at all.
- Facebook recently announced that it’s working on a wrist device that can sense the brain’s signals to your fingers to tell what keys you want to type – essentially letting you typing without a keyboard.
What are typos?
Typos are keyboarding mistakes – accidental strokes that would only happen on a computer, not writing mistakes.
- Misspellings or mixing up “they’re” and “their” is a writing mistake, not a typo.
- Autocorrect mistakes, especially on phones, aren’t typos either.
“Dyslexia” is a disruption of the ability to type on a keyboard.
Dystypia is also known as “dystextia,” where someone has trouble typing on a phone, and is usually seen in people who have suffered a stroke
- It’s impossible to pinpoint one part of the brain that might be responsible for both types of disabilities
Bad Typing
When typing quickly in a fast-moving chat, Katie’s accuracy is garbage.
- She uses a mangled half-version of touch typing, sometimes looking at the keys, using most of her fingers, but definitely not the home row.
In order to catch a typo, she had to go undercover
She had to become…a typo
- To fix the sins of seventh grade, she decided to teach herself to type, and figure out why she made so many typos in the first place.
- Is it my fingers or my brain?
- Am I just a big dummy?
When all else fails, blame the equipment
Different keyboards can indeed affect the way you type
- People aren’t just fans of old ones, they buy special colored keys with unique click sounds and tap pressures
- Daniel Guermeur came to the US to study computer science and found that all of his classmates were much better and faster at typing than he was
- American people type well; they touch type
