To Touch Type or Not?

The "QWERTY" layout of typewriter keys became a de facto standard and continues to be used long after the reasons for its adoption (including reduction of key/lever entanglements) have ceased to apply. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Several centuries back, when I was a young stripling with grandiose ideas and the energy to consider them achievable, I started out as a freelance photo-journalist. At the time, my first wife and I occupied a semi-basement flat that nestled beneath a Tudor farmhouse. It had once served as a hatchery for the chickens that the farmer’s father had bred. The current farmer had lost interest in fowl, other than a small number kept for the production of fresh eggs for the family. So, we lived in a relatively idyllic spot, paying rent and offering my services on the farm as a labourer for a minimum wage. My wife taught at a local school.

I took a touch typing course in preparation for the coming times when I would produce hundreds of articles, stories and features each week and become an editors’ dream. That course, where I joined the ranks of many women of various ages as the only man, took place in a classroom in a building far enough away to require me to cycle the distance. It was spread over a fortnight, weekday mornings only, and we used manual typewriters to take the lessons. This was long before even electric typewriters were around. I had, at home, an ancient upright Olympia machine, manufactured in my birth town of Hull.

The lessons went well with the disciplinarian female teacher sternly ensuring we all moved along apace. By the end of the fortnight, I was proficient and typing at around 70 words per minute. Experience would soon increase that speed.

Then the farmer, who was an odd and rather impractical character, announced that we’d better be prepared to move at short notice since he was seriously considering selling up and moving the whole family to America.

This edict came the Sunday following the end of my, for me, expensive course. After discussions with my then wife, we decided that freelancing, with its unknowns and vagaries, was not promising enough in this uncertain situation. On the Monday following, I’d been mucking out the stables and returned to the flat to discover I needed some paper for a photographic article I was preparing for Amateur Photographer magazine. I walked the couple of miles into town in my smelly wellies, intending to make this a quick trip so I could get on with the article. As I strode down the street leading to the photographic shop I usually frequented, I passed another shop, which also sold cameras, along with many other items of technology. Sellotaped to the glass door was a hand written advert for a sales assistant.

The man behind the counter was friendly as I approached. I nodded to the doorway and mentioned the advert. He looked me up and down, taking in my torn jeans, scruffy tee-shirt, manure-coated boots and the odd strand of straw in my shoulder length hair.

‘Sell me this camera.’

I handled it quickly, familiarised myself with its features and explained them to the man as if he were a customer with little technical knowledge.

‘Okay. Tell me about these binoculars.’

I did the same again, suggesting he might like to take them outside and view the street to get a better idea of their magnification and range.

He listed six items on the shelves behind him. ‘I’ve bought those and given you fifty quid. How much change do I get?’

I told him without hesitation.

‘When can you start?’

I told him I could start after lunch if he wished.

‘Tomorrow will do. Eight o’clock sharp.’

I shook hands with Paddy and left to buy my photo paper from the shop down the road, where they sold only photographic equipment and materials. As I left Paddy’s shop he raised a hand.

‘Just one thing, Stuart. You will be wearing something suitable, won’t you?’

I grinned. ‘I’ve my birthday suit, or the one I got married in. Up to you, Paddy.’

He smiled. ‘The wedding suit, I think, don’t you?’

Thus began a short friendship (I replaced him as manager three months later when he became the area manager for the whole group of shops) and thus also ended my initial foray into freelancing.

It was three years before I found time to get back to a typewriter and we’d remained on the farm throughout the period. But the shop job allowed me to obtain a mortgage to buy our own home.

The touch-typing had long been forgotten.

Since then, because of other commitments, I’ve managed to type with two fingers and a thumb and can manage around 45 words per minute with reasonable accuracy.

Last week, I retired from employment. I bought some touch typing software, Individual Software’s Typing Instructor Platinum; the Full UK English Version. Amazon.co.uk delivered the software today and I’ve installed it and printed out the PDF instruction manual. I’m one of those unusual men who actually thinks an instruction manual is a useful device. Saves so much time.

So, I shall start the typing skills lessons tomorrow, once I’ve read the manual.

It’s my first week of retirement from employment and my first week as an intended full-time writer. Been a bit interrupted by a hospital visit on Monday for assessment and on Tuesday for surgery on an old knee injury. Not the time I would have chosen for the surgery, but pleased to have it out of the way. (In UK, we have the wonderful National Health Service, which means the whole procedure cost me nothing. The slight downside is that we have no choice over timing, but that’s a price worth paying for what is a superb and professional free service.) The surgery, anaesthetic and aftermath have left me less than fit and it’ll be a couple of weeks before I can start to drive again and lead a normal life. I also have to take regular rests for the next few days. But I’ll begin the touch-typing course tomorrow and keep you informed of my progress.

So, my question today is this:

Do you touch type or are you a one, two, three finger typist? How quickly can you get those words down? How accurate are you? Or, do you only write longhand and have some other to transfer the script to text?

Share your experience and thoughts here, please. I love to know how my visitors are doing.

Related articles

• Typewriters: And Ten Things You May Not Know About The Predecessor to the Modern Computer
• Keyboard, you're not my type

Writing: the Pen or the Keyboard?

Image via Wikipedia

Writers are a funny bunch. We each have our own self-imposed rules, routines, favourites and hates. I know of authors who can no more create at the keyboard than they can lay an egg. But my method of composition now depends utterly on the keyboard. This is despite the fact that I can't touch type and use only two fingers (not those two!) and a thumb (either will do, I'm not prejudiced). I have to look at the keyboard as I write and then glance at the screen, with Word's spelling correction thingy open so it underlines any typos I make as I go along. I make a lot of ytops so I really should do something about it.

I should learn to touch type, of course.

In fact, I spent a fortnight doing just that, about 700 years ago, on a manual typewriter, and became quite proficient by the end of the course. Unfortunately, events jumped up and down on my ambition at the time and, having finished the course, I never went near a keyboard again for over two years. By that time, I'd forgotten everything I'd learned and went back to my three digit approach. It's not too bad; I can manage about 45 words a minute, when I'm really going. But I'd be much better off if I could touch type. One day, perhaps…

I don't dare write in script. I was clearly meant to be either a genius or a doctor, because my handwriting is all but indecipherable, even to me! Where did it all go wrong? The bit about being a genius or a doctor, I mean. As for the handwriting, well I have a small excuse that I was one of the lucky few who, following the end of World War II (I'm not that old that I have any personal connection with WWI), I was part of the generation who went to school during the continuing paper shortage. So, I learned to write, at age five, using a framed slate panel and a lead scriber. We complain about Health and Safety rules these days, but at least our kids don't learn using intimate contact with poisonous metals, eh? I was still in the early days of this initial learning when I contracted Scarlet Fever. I recall the ambulance, with its ringing bell (yes, a bell, not a siren) rushing me to the local hospital on Christmas Eve. There, I spent six weeks in an isolation ward, along with umpteen other patients, of all ages and both genders, suffering other contagious illnesses. Another six weeks off school, after I was discharged, meant I'd fallen seriously behind my fellow pupils when I returned to school a few weeks before my sixth birthday. I never caught up. So, that's my excuse for the poor handwriting.

But, in spite of my dyslexic fingers, the keyboard serves me well. Thank heavens for the speedy ability to right wrongs there. I repair spelling errors on the fly, but never actually read what I've written until I reach the end of a piece, no matter whether that piece is a tweet, a short story or a novel. Then I return to the beginning and correct, edit, replace and cut wherever necessary. Unlike many writers, I actively enjoy the editing process. The creative part, which I do at tearing pace, flying through the paragraphs like a demented racehorse set free from its jockey, I love. The making up of lives, events, lands, and all the other story elements feeds that part of me where the imagination dwells.

In my early days, I did actually write in longhand and then transposed the work to type on a manual typewriter; a process that took more time than the composition, usually because I couldn't read my own writing and had to decipher words to make sense of it. I used the less than perfect Tippex to deal with the odd typo. Later, I progressed to an electronic machine with a correction ribbon; a real boon. But, in those days before the word processor and computer printer, any re-arrangement of a sentence involved retyping an entire page and, sometimes, an entire chapter. Publishers required pristine text without alterations, so it could take a long time, much patience, and an entire forest to turn out a manuscript that an agent or editor would accept.

Paper wasn't generally recycled back then, so the waste bin overflowed with screwed up pages. These days, we wait until everything appears perfect on the screen before committing the work to paper. But even that isn't foolproof: every writer understands that editing on paper is far more likely to throw up errors than doing the same job on the computer screen. But, at least, it's simpler to correct now, and it isn't often necessary to reprint the entire work simply because of a few errors.

So, I compose at the keyboard, correct on screen, print in draft and re-edit using a pen, and then I transfer the changes to the file and reprint in 'best' mode to send my work off to editors and agents. I print, as required by the industry, on one side only of the paper, with wide margins. I mean, what's it matter if I still use a forest to achieve this level of perfect presentation? All that matters is that the reading professional will have no reason to reject the piece without even bothering to read it. After all, competition is tough out there. It's good to know that they'll have a pristine piece of work to view before they reject it without reading; makes the whole process so much more worthwhile, don't you think?

A question for you to ponder: Why are you IN a movie, but ON TV?