Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Joy of Typing

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 94 posts

Re: The Joy of Typing

#51

Post by NDizzle »

mikestew wrote: post #4
nbouscal wrote: post #2

> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??

I can type that fast on a phone. I'll assume for the sake of discussion that this number is accurate across a general population. If you sit at a keyboard long enough, how can you not get faster than 12.2 wpm? So much for "kids growing up with computers". All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed? OTOH, do typing classes even exist anym…

Hey, I'm another person whose only class was on a manual typewriter. 7th grade, 1992ish. I'm at 85 wpm 100% accuracy, 130 wpm if I omit capitalization and punctuation. (and let the word processor pick it up)

Re: The Joy of Typing

#52

Post by taeric »

sliverstorm wrote: post #21
taeric wrote: post #5

60 words a minute is still very slow, when it comes to thinking speed. Unless I'm just off my rocker, of course. This is also why folks that take really good notes by hand often have some sort of shorthand system. My question, then, is it worthwhile to investigate some of the more advanced typing techniques out there? I'm curious, but highly skeptical.

Does it matter? I think faster than I type, but a lot of what I think is jumbled garbage. Why on earth would I want to barf that onto the screen? I think perhaps 2x as fast as I type, which gives me time to consider what or how I want to say something, without constraining me to the choking snail's pace that is, for example, T-9. FWIW the article's test pegs me at 95wpm; extended tests with sneaky words usually clock…

Don't know. My hope would be that if I could get more of my thoughts down faster, I would have more time to prune and generally edit what I wrote.

In general, I think there has to be advantages to be a bit more in step with how you are thinking and how you are typing. That is, if I am constantly interrupting my typing thoughts with my actual thoughts, and vice versa, I will go slower.

Probably matters a lot as to how you personally think. I am not a visual person, so I rarely "see" what it is I am thinking. The words are essential to my understanding some things. So, having two thought processes going both involving words is very difficult if one is constantly thrashing the other.

Make sense?

Re: The Joy of Typing

#53

Post by Centigonal »

nbouscal wrote: post #2

> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??

I skimmed the study, and that statistic is a little misleading.

They weren't typing predetermined sentences. They were instructed to come up with a story based on some pictures and write it down. They weren't bottlenecked by typing speed, but rather by pauses for thought between words.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#54

Post by melling »

mikestew wrote: post #20

"because you’re no longer struggling with the tool at hand." I saw this coming somewhere around the first paragraph. Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?" As a parallel, take Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) as a guitar player…

I think you're assuming that because people can't type that that implies they don't remember where the keys are located. People who can't type simply have developed different muscle memory, which is probably less efficient than typing. However, as many people have explained, it's not such a big deal. There has been code completion, in some form, for decades: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HippieExpand

Also, consider that people seldom type "M...y...C...l...a...s...s", they type My

And soon we'll be typing "var foo = 2"

There's so much code completion in a modern IDE:

if for r

Re: The Joy of Typing

#55

Post by taeric »

infogulch wrote: post #44
taternuts wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree, 60 WPM is pretty slow. Even at 130 WPM I still struggle to keep up with my thoughts sometimes. I don't use any special technique/layout because I find 130 to be pretty proficient, but I'm sure using dvorak or some other odd layout would improve speed after the initial learning curve.

I have the opposite problem. I hover around 60 WPM when transcribing or copying, but I often pause mid-sentence or mid-paragraph to gather my thoughts for what to say next (probably more like how to word it correctly) when writing original content. Maybe it's a lack of discipline or practice and I'd be able to form thoughts more quickly if I were required to, or maybe I can form thoughts quickly but my typing doesn't…

So, for me it is that I can not really decide "what to say next" until I have gotten "what I'm saying now" out of my head and onto the screen.

That is, if I can keep an even pace where I'm typing at roughly the speed I'm saying what I want to type, then I don't do this stutter that often. However, if I am constantly getting adrift in how fast I'm typing versus how far ahead I've thought of what to say, then I stutter like crazy.

I'm assuming it has a lot to do with how you "speak" in your head. Some people (myself) do so verbally. Some do so visually.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#56

Post by gknoy »

"""One of the reasons we formally teach handwriting to young children is that you don’t want a bottleneck between the ideas they’re forming and the writing. """

Talking with my son's teachers and pediatricians, one big reason that early classes emphasize writing is not just about literacy, but rather about developing hand muscles.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#57

Post by mikestew »

NDizzle wrote: post #51
mikestew wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can type that fast on a phone. I'll assume for the sake of discussion that this number is accurate across a general population. If you sit at a keyboard long enough, how can you not get faster than 12.2 wpm? So much for "kids growing up with computers". All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed? OTOH, do typing classes even exist anym…

Hey, I'm another person whose only class was on a manual typewriter. 7th grade, 1992ish. I'm at 85 wpm 100% accuracy, 130 wpm if I omit capitalization and punctuation. (and let the word processor pick it up)

1992?! Holy smokes, and here I thought I went to a backwater school (and I did) because we were still using manual typewriters in 1980. :-) They upgraded to electrics a year or two later.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#58

Post by JackMorgan »

mvid wrote: post #39
kbenson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the two probably intersect more often than you think they do One of the reasons I like more terse, concise languages is because it allows me to get the idea represented quicker, so I spend more time thinking about the problem and solution and less time transcribing the solution. There is,of course, a downside in legibility, but I believe that's mostly mitigated for people familiar enough with the language.

When is typing speed ever really the bottleneck? Code gets read 100x more often than it gets written, and any editor or IDE worth it's salt can auto-complete faster than you can think anyway. #teamReadability

So why use a wordy language that makes you read twice as many characters to get the same concepts? It would take a few weeks to learn to read the smaller language, but the rest of your career to gain the benefits. Why write down to the skill of the least skilled member?

Re: The Joy of Typing

#59

Post by baddox »

ANTSANTS wrote: post #49
mikestew wrote: post #20

"because you’re no longer struggling with the tool at hand." I saw this coming somewhere around the first paragraph. Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?" As a parallel, take Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) as a guitar player…

>Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?" I wouldn't be so sure. I can write and type just fine, but I always learned better in class by listening to the teacher instead of trying to produce a pile of notes. All of the kid…

> All of the kids I remember that wasted their time writing down everything the teacher said without really listening to them, did just the same with computers or old-fashioned pen and paper.

I was the same way throughout school, but I think the causal relationship might be reversed. The students who take notes almost robotically might just do so because they have poor verbal memory.

Re: The Joy of Typing

#60

Post by kstenerud »

Centigonal wrote: post #53
nbouscal wrote: post #2

> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??

I skimmed the study, and that statistic is a little misleading. They weren't typing predetermined sentences. They were instructed to come up with a story based on some pictures and write it down. They weren't bottlenecked by typing speed, but rather by pauses for thought between words.

This is why I hate these sorts of "X proven better than Y" posts. In this case, the study is available, so you can call the blogger on his BS. In many cases, the actual study is paywalled or not even linked to, leading to all sorts of misinformation.
Post reply on HN