Writers - Do You Touch Type or Not?

I never learned how to touch type, and I've found it's something that people find surprising from a woman in her mid-40's whose day job involves extensive computer work and who has also churned out a bunch of short stories, novellas and novels in the past seven years. I had a boss who openly shamed me for it, despite my being about a thousand times smarter and more competent than she was, and at my current job had a younger co-worker describe my weird-ass typing technique as "cute".

So what say you, writers? Do you touch type or not? And what are your thoughts (if any) on writers who do one or the other?

ETA: To clarify, I don't have to look at the keyboard to type with my own home-grown method. I use 3 fingers on each hand but it doesn't have the proper technique of traditional touch typing.

 

I'm capable of touch-typing, but I rarely do it. I don't really need the speed most of the time.

Note: By touch-typing, I don't mean using the prescribed fingers on the prescribed keys (though I learned to do that in a typing class way back in the stone age); I mean typing without watching my hands. I just mean watching the screen as the words magically appear on it.

 

I admit, I'm a snob. I type "properly." I can type faster than I can think.

My partner doesn't, and it drives me nuts.

So I'm curious. How many WPM can you type using three fingers on each hand? It doesn't slow you down?

 

I took a couple different typing courses in school, but I think the problem was that I grew up with a computer so by then I had developed my own homegrown method, too. So I don't touch type 'properly' I guess? But I do use all my fingers and I type without looking. I'm not sure what kinda WPM I can hit. Speed's not usually my focus.

 

I honestly don't know what my WPM speed is. I just know that I can easily keep up with my co-workers who do touch type, and I never have any problems with my fingers keeping up with my brain when I write fiction. So no, it doesn't slow me down as far as I've been able to tell.

 

I've never understood why people think typing speed is important. I'm a writer, not a typist. My writing speed is limited by my thinking speed. I spend the vast majority of my writing time staring into space, deciding on sentence rhythms, imagery, word choice, diction level, and on and on. Once I have the sentence in my head, and I've spoken it to myself a couple of dozen times, reciting it with the other sentences in the paragraph until I'm happy with the way it all goes together, I type it. Only then and not before.

For the life of me, I can't write at typing speed without winding up with a pile of trash that has to be rewritten from scratch, and I hate writing trash. The whole reason I write is to create beautiful sentences, paragraphs, characters, and so on. If I'm just going to hack out a heap of crap just to make it to the end of the story, I'm wasting my time.

Because of this, I can write just as fast with pen and paper as I can with a computer. I often do - writing by hand is somehow more satisfying than merely typing.

 

They tried to teach it to me once, in middle school, but I never caught on. I just learned to type my own way, improper as it may be. Pinky, middle, pointer, thumb, pointer, middle. The rest are dead weight.

 

Speaking for experience, my typing speed did used to slow me down. I realized I had a problem when it took me an entire hour to write half a paragraph. I learned how to touch type after that, and it fixed the problem.

If you can type as fast as you think, then yeah, beyond that point, it doesn't matter. But lots of people can't.

 

There's definitely a spectrum. My husband also can't touch type, but unlike me he's never had a computer-centric job or hobby and he hunt and pecks at a snail's pace. Watching him fill out an online form makes me want to scream. He also has no concept of keyboard shortcuts. I love him but my 70 year old mom (who does not know how to touch type) types faster than he does.

 

I touch type. Last time I tested myself I was typing at 110 words per minute. I do find that there are times when I make use of that much speed--it's rare that I type that fast for a sustained period of time, but I think of whole phrases or sentences, and I like to get them on the screen as fast as possible, so I can look at them.

 

Haha, it takes me an hour to write half a paragraph for a story, but that's not because of my typing speed....
and now I'm depressed.

In seriousness, I've been around computers my whole life and my dad was a computer technician, so it was only natural for me to eventually develop the ability to touch type, but I don't really look down on people who can't. They probably produce ten times the quality of the content that I could ever dream of, because I'm not confident nor assertive with my writing.

 

I never learnt to touch type in any formal way, but I developed the skill fairly naturally out of playing video games. Typing as fast as possible is super important for PC games because (obviously) while you're typing, you're not playing.

This does mean, though that my fingers rest on WASD, shift, and space, as opposed the the "correct" layout, whatever that is.

 

I touch type. I took a whole typing course in high school, and I was never the fastest in the class, but I did pretty well.

For me, it's crucial. The few times I've tried writing on phones or tablets have been brutal - I just can't get in the flow of writing when I'm having to think about the process of getting the words from my brain onto the screen. With a proper keyboard the words just sort of appear without any conscious effort on my part. One less thing to distract me!

But I don't think the "proper" technique is all that important. If the words come out of your fingers at a reasonable pace, I don't really care which fingers you're using to make it happen!

 

I can touch type but it actually slows me down I use three fingers most of the time but mainly it's my middle fingers that hit the keys. I have bad wrists so I can't touch type for long. My arms move my hands all over the keyboard as needed. I'm quite fast at it, as fast as I can think and I can also look away from the keyboard for extended periods of time to watch the words appear if I want but it's much easier to look at the keys.

 

I'm with you. Three fingers of each hand, and thumbs for the space bar. Quite fast, but I gotta look at the keys. I remember taking speed typing back in the dark ages in high school - it didn't stick. Sigh!

 

I used to work 9-1-1, I think our minimum to get an interview was 35wpm, 95% accuracy, and you only got faster from there. The problem that I have now is half the time I'm on an English keyboard,and half on a Japanese one where the punctuation is in different places, which slows me down, but I can't imagine not touch-typing.

Just did this message on a touch screen with my thumbs, and it took forever.

 

This is basically me. I can type pretty quickly without looking at the keys the majority of the time, but I have no actual technique. Hasn't really been a problem for me yet.

 

I don’t use my pinkies. Don’t look at the keyboard. When I was a kid, they acted like 60wpm was some kind of standard, so once I could do that I stopped counting.

Couldn’t tell you why I hate typing with proper form. Never found it useful I guess.

 

I never learned to type "properly". Most of my typing skills come from doing a lot of writing, and a lot of programming. For the latter, I imagine that traditional touch typing could be a problem since writing code requires quite a few special characters.

Anyway, while typing I think I make use of all ten fingers, although 6 of them do most of the job. I can write at about 80 wpm with almost perfect accuracy without looking my keyboard (or the text I'm writing, for that matter).

 

It's so fascinating, the variety of practices you find even about something as mundane as typing...I never would have even thought to try and hold an entire paragraph in my head at once. I'd be too worried (rightly or not) about forgetting something. Instead usually what I do is spend time thinking of the first sentence, and once I have that just see how the graf develops as I type. Usually the result is adequate, and occasionally I surprise myself by pulling something I really like out of basically nowhere. Although sometimes I find myself halting every couple of words to agonize--do I go with "stealing" or "thievery", that sort of thing.

As far as actual typing, I guess I'm young enough (#Millennial) to have been taught proper typing pretty early on and it's just always worked for me. Although even between me and my youngest brother (~6 years younger) there's a noticeable difference...I had to learn typing in school, but he was so young when we got our first computer at home that he basically just absorbed it. And now my own daughter (~2.5 years) may very well think keyboards are old fashioned because she's already pretty proficient with touchscreens. Anyway, technology, man, it's weird.

 

I use a completely different keyboard layout than the majority of people. I almost never look at my keyboard. I'm pretty sure I'm quite close to doing it properly, as I do use all of my fingers and stay on the home row, it's just that my home row is AOEUIDHTNS. I don't like the idea of a "proper" way to type. Like playing a guitar, the size of your hands makes a huge difference in how you type fastest. QWERTY is designed to go slowly anyway (because oldschool typewriters would jam if you went too fast.)

I'm not sure how I'd be able to work efficiently if I had to look at my keyboard in order to type. Often I'm looking at one window while typing in another.

 

I've heard that Dvorak keyboards are supposed to be a lot more efficient, but I've also heard that it's almost impossible to be "bilingual" with your fingers, so I've never switched my home computer over since I have to use shared computers at work. It's bad enough remembering that apostrophes are SHIFT 7 and quotation marks are SHIFT 2 on a Japanese keyboard...

 

I do touch type, 90-100wpm when I type continuously (usually I'm stopping to think). I have no opinion of the way other people type and I think anyone who does is strange! What does it matter if someone else uses three fingers, or looks at the keyboard? Bizarre.