Touch Typing

In a conversation recently I was prompted to think back to my time spent at College in my late teenage years. I spent the duration of the course (two years) living in the spare bedroom of an elderly (as I perceived her at the time) lady who would provide me with breakfast together with a meal each night when I returned from my day at college. By coincidence it was during this period that our country changed from imperial to metric coinage; a shilling became ten pence and we lost farthings and halfpennies along the way. My landlady, having been brought up on pounds, shillings and pence, was quite disturbed by this change and I can recall her asking me whether our clocks would also be changing, minutes and seconds becoming decimalised. I hope I gave her the assurance she needed.

As part of my Diploma course I was required to produce a 'thesis', the subject being of my choice but the end product had to be a set length.

It so happened that around this time my parents had bought me a portable typewriter, a heavy clattery thing that went 'ping' each time you got to the end of a line and had to shift the paper to the next row. The positioning of the letter keys, what we now call 'qwerty' after the letters on the top left row, was developed in the 1870s by a man called Christopher Sholes and it was designed to prevent the typewriter levers of character pairs used most often when writing in English from jamming against one another. The layout has broadly survived since then although the French have 'azerty' and the Germans, 'qwertz' to suit their own languages.

If my typewriter still exists it will be on the shelves of a museum somewhere by now and I cannot recall using it much, if at all, after my college course finished. At the time, however, something prompted me to use it to type out my thesis and in doing so I made a decision which still lives with me to this day. Rather than simply pressing the keys with one finger, the simplest way for a non-typist, I deliberately made myself type using all my fingers, each key having a 'correct' finger allocated to it. I forced myself to learn to Touch Type. Thinking back I have no real recollection of what made me decide to do this; I was under no pressure from anyone to learn this skill and had no need for it for many years afterwards. Furthermore it slowed down considerably my efforts to produce a typed thesis since correcting my mistakes, of which there were quite a few, had to be done with 'Tipp-Ex', a white fluid that had to be painted on carefully with a brush then allowed to dry before it could be over typed. I struggle to recall what prompted me to put myself through all this.

The use of computers in the home came along some years later and then finally I found myself faced with a computer and keyboard in my workplace. My fingers were delighted to find themselves facing another qwerty keyboard where they were pressing the very same letter keys that they had been taught to touch years before so they didn't complain at all when they were asked to type something. 'We've been here before', they shouted, as the old skill came back. And it has stayed with me. I still far prefer using a keyboard to write anything more than a short message. My brain has memorised the position of the letters so well that I only have to think of a word and my fingers know where to go. This all happens without any conscious effort. Even when no keyboard is present I can tap out the shape of a word on any flat surface if requested.

 

The technology we use in our everyday lives keeps on changing and today we have small pocket sized computers (we call them 'phones') but these things will still present the user with an image of the qwerty keyboard on the screen. This has resulted in a new form of touch typing, this time using the thumbs to tap the screen whilst the other fingers hold the device steady. Some people can do this very rapidly, maybe even close to my own typing speed when I am going flat out. And our phones will go one step further by presenting a suggested word on the screen after only a few keys have been pressed, something my typewriter could never do. Phones are even clever enough to type the words we speak into them, although both of these talents can lead to rather embarrassing mistakes for which the bottle of Tipp-Ex is no help at all.

Today, those of us who still prefer to type with all fingers on a qwerty keyboard can also go small by using a folding version of the gadget. This is (naturally) powered by a rechargable battery hidden inside and the absence of any connecting wires indicates that it will send signals to a nearby screen using Bluetooth radio waves. Somehow I cannot imagine my elderly landlady coping with such cleverness were she still with us today.