A lost art.....

Like a lot of people, and all geeks, I spend a lot of time on the computer. Of course when you are on the computer you spend a lot of time typing. I think the new modern term is keyboarding, but it is the same thing. The interesting thing is that years ago we used to have a class in high school called typing! We learned all about proper form for business letters and other types of documents. More important though is that we learned to touch type. We learned where to put our hands and what fingers were suppose to go with what keys. We also then learned how to increase our speed over time. If you were reasonably good you would type about 60 words a minute, which is about what the average person speaks. Most secretaries would type in the 90 to 120 words per minute range. There was a teacher that could actually do close to 200 words per minute!!!

Now days touch typing and decent speed seem to be a lost art. Most people that I work with in the computer field don't even touch type. They use the old hunt and peck method. It takes a long time for them to type up anything. Many times I will be communicating via instant messaging with a work partner in another city somewhere and it takes forever for them to respond with a single sentence. Emails are rife with spelling and grammar errors. They are very short, and often don't communicate the information well. Most of this, in my opinion, can be attributed to the fact that they are such poor typists that it is painful to communicate through typed correspondence.

The other issue with poor typing in business is how much less productive you are. If you type at only like 10 words per minute it will take forever for you to complete a typed task. Well it will take a long time if you do a good job at it. Thus the tendency for people to have short, choppy, poorly formed documents. It just takes to long to do it right.

Well here is the point of this blog post, it is easy to fix. You can easily get pretty decent at typing skills on your computer. All you need to do is to spend 10 minutes a day with a typing tutor program. There are both commercial and free ones. The most well known commercial one is probably Mavis Beacon Typing. You can get it for $19.95 from Amazon. There is also SpongeBob Typing 2008 for $13.49. TypeRightNow includes a special peekproof keyboard cover and sells for $26.99. I think for my kids I am going to make my own version of that. I have several extra keyboards laying around. I think it is time to start taking the letters off the keyboard and making them type with those. If you go to download.com you can find some free typing tutor programs too.

Anyway, like all good skills, it is all about repetition. If you are trying to learn the piano or guitar they will tell you to spend like a half hour a day every day and not try long marathon sessions. The same is true with keyboarding. And you don't even need a half hour a day. Just take 10 minutes a day going through the exersizes. Or you can even break it up and one day is exersize day and the next is one of the keyboarding games. Yes these programs include games too! First you will want to see how fast you can type. Then set yourself some goals to hit for speed and accuracy. I bet by this next fall you can easily be up to between 3o and 40 words per minute, and you will feel much more comfortable with typing on the computer. And if you get to 200 words per minute then email me with a screen shot of the results and I will post it on www.atomicsupergeek.com hall of keyboarding fame so you can be world famous!