Turns out, I can’t type
In the early days of the internet – errm, about 1999 – I bought my first domain. I’m not going to spell it out here because it’s long unused but I may snap it up again someday, but for the purposes of this story you should know it contained the word ‘type’.
I can type. No this isn’t dictated to a secretary. I can type pretty fast – 80+ WPM usually, faster if I get into it. Like many things you do on instinct it’s really more a question of ‘letting go’ to get to the faster speeds.
However, I’m self taught. When I started learning, I was on a typewriter. (Kids: a mechanical version of a Chromebook. Except all it could do was write words.) Typing on a typewriter is a distinctly different experience from a computer keyboard but it’s where I learned. I remember being pretty quick on it, but I was still a heads down, look at the keys guy.
I didn’t spend a lot of years (2? 3?) on a typewriter before I got my first computer with a real keyboard (no, the ZX Spectrum doesn’t count), which I actually used for writing (step aside, Amiga 500). As I typed my way through university and out the other side, my speed got a little faster.
My first job (as a journalist) inevitably involved a lot of typing so I got quicker, but even then – I’m pretty sure – I still typed looking at the keys most of the time. I was very much a two-finger typist.
Decades later I can type without looking at my hands (or even opening my eyes, apparently), but I am still mostly a two finger typist. Occasionally a third or forth will enter the equation, but while I know what the little nubs on the ‘F’ and ‘J’ keys (the ‘home’ keys) are for, I’ve never used them in anger.
So last weekend I tried it out. I found a free typing tutor site and started doing the exercises.
And boy, I cannot type using the traditional touch-typing method. No. It felt like trying to walk for the first time, or re-learning after some terrible injury. I’d tell my finger to poke ‘D’ and get ‘S’. I’d be sure I was about to type a ‘K’ and get ‘L’. It really felt like a fundamental part of me was broken.
It’s not, clearly, as I’m getting words out here, but I’m all the more acutely aware of when I mis-type (I just did, hitting 0 when I wanted the hyphen) now that a more refined method is potentially open to me.
Will I persist with the touch typing? I think I might. I’m not sure how many lessons and how much practice it might take to get to a point where the ol’ two-fingers get absorbed into a whole hand, but I think in the end, the effort might be worth it.
