Now more than ever, a lot of what we do in our lives indirectly depends on typing. It is the fundamental way we chose to interact with computers.
This is a link of communication between us and the machines, and if we are efficient in the way we type, we can fluently and effortlessly communicate our thoughts and opinions over to the digital world.
The brain is a bad medium of storage for long term thought. Who knows how much we have lost from the past because it was lost in translation through the ages?
The more well versed you are at a language, the better you can interact with locals of that language. Until we get brain chips (that can be trusted) to directly translate our thoughts onto a computer, typing on a keyboard is the fastest way to command the mighty computer.
An analogy is going to a foreign land.
If you find yourself on a remote island, you’ll survive by interacting with the locals (provided they’re friendly) through human emotions and hand-signals. Your time there will be much better served if you found someone who speaks a common language.
I will expand on data transmission and communication - speed and retention.
Keyboard Layout
An interesting change you can adopt to typing speed is your keyboard layout. Try DVORAK or COLEMAK. The layout we use nowadays is the QWERTY layout. It was created in the late 19th century by Christopher Sholes. Simply put, it is shite.
A century after Sholes finalised the keyboard, historian Jan Noyes of Loughborough University published a lengthy analysis concluding: “There appears … to be no obvious reason for the placement of letters in the QWERTY layout.”
The layout was not designed with touch-typists in mind. As Noyes pointed out: ‘the original QWERTY keyboard was intended for “hunt and peck” operation and not touch-typing’. That may explain the well-known practical shortcomings of QWERTY.
In the 1930s, as typewriters and typing became more common, researchers began questioning its usefulness. One fierce critic, educational psychologist August Dvorak (a distant cousin of the composer), had a team of engineers test 250 keyboard variations and concluded that the QWERTY design was one of the worst possible arrangements.
The real reason for its stubborn persistence is inertia: imagine the cost of designing, testing and manufacturing an alternative – and then retraining billions of people to use it. As long as keying letters into a machine is needed, QWERTY is here to stay.
Behavioral science is truly the following: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
With that said, learning a layout like Colemak is a one-time investment that will allow you to enjoy faster and pain-free typing for the rest of your life. I would recommend it over DVORAK due to the fact that common shortcut keys (copy & paste) remain in the same place. It would really suck to re-wire your brain for such elemental operations.
It is an efficient layout for typing, as commonly used letters are placed on the the stronger fingers, and efficiently distributed.
