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!