Internet — “What kind of a stupid, crazy, nonsensical headline is this? Are you drunk, Rodgers? Or did you ingest free hallucinogens supplied through your Canadian government’s grand social experiment?”
Me — “No, I’m clean and sober. I just found this phrase online and thought it’d open an interesting Kill Zone discussion about our keyboarding skills. Here, check out this meme.”
I’ll bet all, or almost all, folks who follow the Kill Zone site are writers to some degree. (BTW, I see the Kill Zone was once again listed in the May/June 2024 Writer’s Digest issue as being in the Top 100 sites for writers.) So, I think one thing we have in common outside of killing in zones is keyboarding.
I learned to type in 1978 while in the police academy. Typing was a mandatory class, and we had to graduate with at least 40 words per minute. This was long before personal computers. First, we banged away on manual/mechanical typewriters and then moved to electrics.
It wasn’t until the early 80s that “word processors” arrived and we threw away whiteout and carbon paper. By the time I retired, each of us in the detective section had laptops as well as standalones on our desks. That was just as the internet hatched.
Keyboarding seems to be a relatively new term for punching out letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and stories—regardless of your medium. I hate texting as I’m somewhat anal on grammar, punctuation, and so on. That little screen on my Samsung is too small for my eyes, and that little keyboard makes a lot of mistakes that must be reversed before sending. It’s too much of a time suck when I can email from my 17” laptop. Or often, I use the telephone feature.
I’ve been a civilian writer for over a decade. Grammarly shows me at 3.1 million words, and I keep track of my speed. When I’m in the zone (as in writing into the dark) I pump out 1,000-1,200 words per hour. And that’s using a thumb and two fingers on my right hand and one finger on my practically useless left.
Cursive is nearly extinct, but I do a lot of block printing in notes. I’m not one for using a keyboard to take down studies except for cutting & pasting from the web and printing it off on a Word.doc. However, when composing something fresh, such as this hastily prepared post, I let my fingers do the talking. At 519 words, this took me about half an hour to complete.
That’s all I have to say about the keyboarding exercise using Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow to replace the lazy old dog typing thing. Whatever works, right?
Kill Zoners — Your turn. Tell us about your QWERTY adventure. What keyboarding method/skills do you currently use? Are you an all-in, eight-fingers and two-thumbs speed demon? Or are you a two-fingered hunt and pecker? Or maybe somewhere in between? Join in and share your stuff in the comments!
When I was 15, growing up in Mexico City, more years ago than I care to compute, we were required to take a semester worth of ‘manual labors’ at our all-girl Catholic school: first, we took two weeks of each of the three offerings – baby layettes, stuffed plush animals, or something useful (typing). The rest of our semester would be spent in one of the three.
I made darn sure I got into the typing group. Touch typing, full blown, with the keyboard covered on big manual typewriters (so we had to learn where the keys were) – it has served me well for the rest of my life, starting with being able to do typing in an office job, and earning $0.25 more an hour as a Kelly Girl during college as a statistical typist. Which led to early computer data entry jobs…
Now I type all day. My OWN words.
You’ll have to excuse me, Alicia, but I had to Google “baby layettes”. Nice story, and I’m sure typing became a much more marketable skill. I’m interested in what your word speed is with your years of experience.
Fast enough so I never have to wait to catch up.
So far the hands still work – possibly an advantage of having learned to use all ten fingers to type, possibly from those long ago piano lessons.
Best part – I don’t have to look, and I still catch mistypings AS I make them.
The other two options were preparing the girls for marriage a little too obviously. I still did all that – coming up on 49 years of marriage this year, three kids – but I wanted that career first. And I got to have some of it.
I am currently fighting and losing against my Apple spellchecker and keyboard. Not only do they refuse to let me use certain words, but periods keep appearing for no apparent reason. Curse. you, modern tech.
Good morning, Marilynn. I have the latest MS Office with the “smart” Word program. I’ve finally turned the spell check feature off and go with Grammarly and even it is wrong a lot of times. Thankfully, I grew up under a mother who had a Lit Masters and was a school teacher.
I used to be a touch typist with medium high speed. Now that I’m older with neuropathy and a bit of arthritis in my hands, I can’t do it anymore without hunt and peck due to the inability to feel or use certain fingers. As long as a few of them still work, it’s ok. Age may have some limitations, but it is denied to so many, therefore, I can’t complain. 🙂
Yes, aging has it’s good sides and downsides, Rebecca. I’m still at the same speed I was at while in my 20s. Typing speed, that is. I suspect many seniors who develop finger mobility disabilities might be turning to AI aps – voice to text. Some of the programs seem impressive.
In the ’80s, my mother’s best friend advised me NOT to learn to type, as I (a young woman) would then be limited to secretarial roles. Oh, how times have changed.
I smiled reading your comment, Janet. In the post, I mentioned how all the detectives were using laptops at the time I retired. What was ironic was our steno, who had done our typed reports, now spent full time not typing but teaching the detectives how to use the laptops to type their own reports.
In high school in the Seventies, I was grouped in with the smart kids going to college, and one of the courses we took as a group was typing because of all those course papers we’d have to type. Typing, not just for secretaries.
Was different in the early 60s
My first thought at reading “Sphinx of black quartz…” was that’s the title to a Dashiel Hammet-esque noir novel…
I went to a small private school for a spell, and one summer between my second and third years in high school, my mother took it upon herself to teach me, and two chums, how to touch type on Dad’s big ol’ manual typewriter, using a textbook she had from way back whenever that opened so that it stood “portrait” styles next to the beast… and thinking that would help us with papers and such when we finally schlepped off to college… and I got a manual, portable typewriter for graduation that, now that I think of it, was one of my favorite gifts of ALL time…
Little did I realize that I would use these typing skills to do my day job – architectural drawing and drafting (which is where I finally learned to quit cheating by sneaking peeks at the number and symbol keys – mostly).
My T-square, triangles, French curves, and templates have all been relegated to my office wall as objects d’art a la Applebee’s…
However, I miss the tactile nature of pen or pencil on paper, and still sketch and write the old analog way – by hand… and because I put – and inherited from Dad – the curse in cursive, I tend to “letter” in the old school drafting way (albeit sloppily, but more legibly – usually).
I love your comments, George. I feel like I’m right there with you. I have to share a personal quirk. I’m a sucker for 1920s nostalgia and have part of my writing and recording studio set up like a 1920s detective office. I splurged and bought (won’t say how much I paid for it because my wife might read this) a pristine Underwood No 5 Standard Typewriter. It’s a thing of perfect beauty and I wish I could hook it to the internet so I could clack its keys instead of pound this plastic playboard.
Learned to type on an IBM Selectric in high school (early 80’s). Back then it was all the rage to work on a typewriter where you typed a line of text and then it spewed it out on the page. I was in the ‘secretarial science’ classes at my high school. Type at around 120 WPM. I don’t miss carbon paper at all! UGH! Though even now, if I’ve printed out a manuscript or something else to read, I do occasionally miss White Out. LOL!
As for using a cell phone, I’m a 1-finger typist for text messages. While I see people who magically hold their cell phone in both hands and type away with their thumbs, that doesn’t work for me. The letters on the cell phone keyboard are much too small, and as mentioned in today’s post, require a lot of correction. So the one finger method, slow as it is, works for me.
But the secretarial sciences, including typing, were very useful classes to take. Unlike say, algebra….
Hi Brenda! I am so with you about those tiny keys. I have a side job that supplied me with a Blackberry, and I think the inventor should be shot with a ball of their own shite. And those thumb-texting kids? I think a lot of them just do that to irritate old guys like me.
My mom insisted I take typing in junior high (on an upright manual – either an Underwood or Remington) because one of the few job opportunities for females back then was secretary. It’s a skill that has served me well, and I can type almost as fast as I can think when I’m writing.
I do remember that my name back then, with the exception of one letter, was totally left-handed.
My kids refused to take typing in high school because the teacher had a reputation for being a hard grader, and they didn’t want to lower their GPAs. They’re self-taught typists, and I’ve never asked them about their techniques.
I can’t type on my phone for love or money. Like Garry, I prefer doing as much as possible on my computer, with it’s full size keyboard and a 27 inch monitor.
Terry, is there anywhere I can buy a double-sized keyboard and a 54-inch monitor? Some days I need them.
Not only did I learn typing in middle school – 1967-1969, but I took two years of shorthand. I wanted to be a secretary. Those skills served me well when I got a job as secretary to a bank manager making 50 cents an hour more than the tellers.
Now I crank out 1,500 words an hour, 2,000 on a good day.
Thanks for the fond look back on those clunky manual typewriters.
You’ve got seniority over me, Jane. And way more speed. A little shorthand trivia. One of the detectives I worked with learned shorthand and used it to take notes. It worked great when he was on the witness stand and the defense lawyers couldn’t challenge him on what his notes said.
I started typing on an old black Remington manual type writer back in the early 70s. It belonged to my dad, but he happily handed it to me. I got pretty speedy at hunt-n-peck with the caps lock on. In high school, I took three years of typing and became a speed demon with my speed over 100 wpm with accuracy around 95%. I found work in the computer industry where the typing skills came in handy. I continued writing all through my life so my typing skills never degenerated, although the keyboard slowed me down due to instant correction capabilities. Sometimes, I’ll be working on a story or article and my husband will poke his head into the office to see if I’m just hitting the keyboard in frustration. My typing keeps up with the speed of my thoughts sometimes. So that’s been my typing journey. I recently bought the blue tooth typewriter keyboard interface so get the nostalgic feeling of my original typing days. It couldn’t keep up. Same thing used to happen to my IBM Selectric.
Wow, Joe! 100 wpm on a manual. That’s impressive! Somewhere I recall seeing (or hearing) some sort of app where you can get manual clacking sounds to accompany a plastic keyboard.
Typewriting was required for all students in my junior high school in Tulsa. A guy who was my best friend had a dad who sold office machines and he said at home, they had a typewriter with a daisy wheel. It sounded so exciting and far beyond the manuals in the classroom where we’d type so fast the keys would get tangled. We had a great time learning and laughing about our mistakes, but I have always loved it. My grandkids are impressed because apparently they aren’t learning full-hand typing in their elementary keyboard classes. It is a subject I never regretted taking and has served me well my whole life, unlike Calculus and Analysis, which wouldn’t have been useful in my dream career as a photojournalist.
The daisy wheel. Now that rings a bell, Becky. Some time ago I saw one of these in a shop and it made me think of something on the typewriter topic. Did you know that Tom Hanks collects vintage typewriters?
My first home computer printer in 1986 was a daisy wheel. Dot matrix printers circa 1986, at least in my price range, weren’t great. That daisy wheel lasted until 1994. Part of me still misses it.
A friend once gave me a used Juki daisy wheel printer. I recollect its overly loud “BAMMITY-BAM-BAM-BAM!” sound. I took it in for repairs once, and the technician noted that it had no serial number. It was a “first article,” the machine used by someone else I knew to write the manual. I later sold it to another party for $50.
I did not know that about Hanks! What a cool guy . . . 🙂
I can still hear my enthusiastic, flamboyant 7th and 8th grade typing/English teacher, Mrs. Bloom, reciting our typing drills. “Fff, space, jjj, space, f, space, j, space, fff,’ for our giant IBMs with blank keys. I was pretty fast back then, and did end up with a secretarial job for a few years that partially paid for my years in college.
Now I can type pretty fast on my laptop, but of course, I’m always looking at the screen to see what I’m putting out, and I can’t help but go back to correct my mistyping mistakes. When I’m in the writing zone, my fingers move faster than my brain. Maybe others have experienced this too, but at times, I feel like the story comes from my hands and not my brain.
Some people are nostalgic for, or like the feel of the typewriter. I’d take my laptop over a typewriter any day. I hate using correction fluid, or even the backspace correction tape, and I would miss cutting, copying, pasting, and deleting.
Mrs. Bloom sounds like a great drill instructor, Michelle. Come to think of it, I remember my drill instructor from the police academy but not my typing instructor. And my old drill instructor is now the administrator of our veterans Facebook page.
Speaking of typing in the zone, is my friend Harvey Stanbrough out there this morning? He’s an amazingly prolific writer, and I’d love to know his typing speed.
My own QWERTY adventure started in high school, when I took a journalism class and tried to learn how to type on a beast of a manual typewriter. The keys kept jamming. I remember it being a failure, and yet wound up with stories in the school newspaper and a local weekly as a high school correspondent. I must have submitted them either in long-hand or hunt-and-pecked my way. I don’t remember.
What I do remember is a couple of years later successfully taking a typing class in college on an IBM Selectric. The electric typewriter was transformative, and I rapidly learned the QWERTY layout and never looked back.
Shortly after my wife and I married in 1982, on her 19th birthday and three weeks short of my 21st, my mother gave me a used Smith Corona as a present to help with my writing. I used that typewriter for three years, typing my first short story submissions and college papers. When it gave up the ghost, we bought a Brother electronic typewriter, but that eventually conked out. By then I was using a computer.
Learning QWERTY has served me well, both in library land and as a writer. I’m not the fastest typist but can hit a decent clip if needed.
Thanks for the walk down QWERTY memory lane this morning, Garry.
Nice comment, Dale. We’ve both seen quite the transformation in the word processing world. I wonder what the next stage in writing evolution will be – it’s certain to involve AI, I’m sure.
And how in the world can someone hit 100 wpm on a manual without sticking the keys?
Darn you, Garry, this sent me down the rabbit hole looking for a photo of the little portable Olympia typewriter integrated in its own case with handle. It was aqua with slightly smaller footprint than today’s laptops, about 4-5″ in depth when the lid was closed. It was a gift in the 1960s and I wrote stories with it as well as many term papers.
Does anyone else remember having to include footnotes on the bottom of the page of term papers? You had to estimate exactly how many lines the footnote needed to be and allow that much space to fit them at the bottom. If you miscalculated, you had to type the whole page over again. The nuns were sticklers about error-free papers, no erasures or whiteout.
On a manual, I used to touch-type about 50 wpm and was quite accurate. Starting with an IBM correcting Selectric, my accuracy started to decline b/c corrections were so easy. Now with word processing, I can type 150+ mistakes/minute.
150? Wow, Debbie. You win the turkey, unless someone can honestly top that. And I remember that term “touch type”. Come to think of it, is there any other way??
What a fun post, Garry! I really enjoyed it, along with the comments.
I learned to type in 6th grade on my Mom’s manual upright. I think that it’s somewhere on a shelf in our garage now. Maybe Hanks would buy it…
Mom typed fast on it…about 90wpm. I never got that fast, but I did take typing in high school because it was either that elective . . . or the dreaded home ec! And I remember my typing teacher asking me why I was taking the class since I could already out-perform most of my classmates. I gave some lame answer about needing a brush-up, but it was really the threat of having to learn cooking or some darn thing. 🙂
Now, when I’m zoning in my writerly cave, I think I type about 90-95wpm. (If I don’t yield to my edit gene, that is…)
Happy Thurs-yay!
And Happy Thurs-yay back atcha, Deb. IMV (In My View) maintaining 90-95 is very respectable, especially error free (or a low error rate). It’s that stopping to edit or correct that slows me down.
And whoever invented my keyboard should have to use it some time. The left uppercase key is right above and way too close to the control button and I don’t know how many times I’ve accidently hit control which sends my work into a hallucinogenic spazz.
When I saw the title of your post, Garry, I was wondering what you were up to. Maybe murder using a statue of a sphinx of black quartz?
I learned touch typing as a teen, and that skill has served me well. I couldn’t remember how many WPM I could type, so I tested myself just now by copying a couple of paragraphs from an article on plot points I had lying on my desk. 70 WPM, one mistake.
I typed my husband’s entire PhD thesis (around 100 pages) on an IBM Selectric. Since his degree is in high-energy physics, there were lots (make that LOTS) of hairy equations, and I had to keep changing the selectric ball for a second one that had Greek symbols, and then back again. Being your average perfectionist (and newly wed), I trashed any page as soon as I made a mistake. That taught me to be a very careful typist. 🙂
It’s like George said, the title sounds like Dashiell Hammett noir. 70 wpm works out (according to my calculator because I can’t do head-math) to 4200 wph which is mind-blowing if anyone could keep it up for an hour. Interesting about the Greek symbols. Thanks to Word, they’re all right here in a digital form. Enjoy your day, Kay!
I learned to type in high school in the late 60s on some kind of manual machine. I got fast enough for a decent grade, but I wasn’t fast. By the late 1990s, I was working in a tech company as a project manager. About 3 hours of every day was spent in meetings, and the remainder of my day saw me immersed in email. I received and read about 3500 emails per month and sent about 2200. My typing speed was somewhere in the 85wpm range, more than double what I’d done in high school.
By the time my daughter was in grade school, they were already teaching kids to type instead of teaching cursive. She was pretty slow, so I bought a couple of computer typing games to make practice less painful. She got good enough to work her way through college typing transcripts of dialogue in computer games for closed captioning and translation. She’s a whiz at thumb typing on her phone. Like others here, I can’t hit those tiny keys for anything and stick with my computer keyboard. Old shaky hands and phone screens just don’t mix.
Cursive really is becoming a lost art, KS. I just tried a few sentences and my handwriting has gone downhill. I print in draftsman style so that still works great for notes but cursive, nope. Gone. Pretty much bye-bye.
It’s really something to watch the young folk on their keyboards, whether on a full-size or the phones. My kids are 36 and 34 and have very impressive keyboarding skills but their cursive really sucks. Anyway, that’s progress.
Considering I taught myself to type on cardboard, with a keyboard drawn onto it, I’m happy to report I use all eight fingers and both thumbs. Lightning fast, without looking at the keys. 🙂
🙂 🙂 🙂
I remember you telling me that, Sue. Now where did you come up with that idea? That is very creative. And obviously effective. Enjoy your day, BFF.
That idea was born from desperation, determination, and unwillingness to concede to my circumstances. 😉
Late to the party. Again. About 1951, I took typing at Audubon Jr. High School, taught by Mr. Coopersmiith. I took it again in summer school at Manual Arts HS, about 1954. When I helped close up my Astronomy Prof’s home, 12 years after his death, his Olympia was holding down one corner of a tarp on the patio. I asked for it and got it. It’s a 1964 model, in almost new condition. Yes, you can still get ribbons for it. I used it for my Xmas newsletter a few years ago, and, if I’m still on the planet, may so use it again this year. It’s a memento of my favorite boss and teacher, my friend of many years, Gibson Reaves, PhD.
Better late than never, JGA. Great comment. Nice. Enjoy your day and the old typewriter!
Really late to the dance. Like most I was introduced to typing in Mrs. Petrides Personal Use Typing class at Metuchen High School. They had ancient manual Royals.
A few years ago I went to an auction and bought an IBM Correcting Selectric fresh out of factory overhaul for a dollar. It works fine. I reckon I’ll try typing a story on it and see how I do.
Fun fact. Elvis Presley’s red IBM Model C typewriter has been auctioned at Heritage in 2013 and Barnaby’s in 2020.
https://entertainment.ha.com/itm/music-memorabilia/memorabilia/elvis-presley-an-ibm-electric-typewriter-circa-1960s/a/7082-46319.s
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One good thing about being late to the dance, Robert, is there’s always the available girl last standing. Curious – What did Elvis’s typewriter sell for? Don’t see the figure in the attached article.