Mavis Beacon and the necessity of “practicing” your typing skills
I recently was challenged to start practicing my typing skills. I am 33 years old and I have been using my keyboard regularly since 1990. I cut my touch typing teeth on Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on an old Macintosh computer.
I use both hands, don’t look down, and still am a little sore about losing to Meagan Murrey in a typing competition in keyboarding class.
So at first, I was pretty skeptical about doing this. I mean I can type faster than 60 words per minute regularly. That should be good enough for work and life right?
Why should I “practice” typing, when it is something I do every day?
30 minutes later.
I am frustrated. Not because I am not typing fast. but because I found “errors” in my typing.
I found out that I have been double tapping the caps lock key to capitalize my letters instead of using the Shift keys. I am literally adding an extra unnecessary keystroke. Don’t get me started on which shift key to use depending on the required keystroke.
I also found that I use my index finger to type the character “c” instead of using my middle finger. I am having a tinge of
Finally, my wpm count is not consistent when taken into account over a long period of time. It’s more of in the 40’s or 50’s range. Sure, I can crank it up to over 100 wpm for a few seconds but on average I am less than one word per second. Ouch to my ego.
Typing data has come a long way too.
I used typingclub.com and there are others but I was impressed with their visualization of data.
Ugh. You know, I miss the Mavis Beacon rudimentary gamification and simple word per minute count.
There is also so much more data visualization of your deficiencies if you are willing to pay for it. Kind of punishing if you ask me.
Retraining Muscle memory
I play the guitar and notice that if I am not careful I slip into bad habits when playing and my once tight sound starts to become sloppy. So I have to practice certain sections more than others until I hear it right and then work to mimic that sound over and over, training my hands and arms to do the right thing at the right time.
So now, my typing with the letter “c” and capitalization using the shift key instead of the Caps Lock has gotten slower. I am thinking about which finger I am using and how I can capitalize a letter.
Those are my most glaring errors in typing I have found so far. There may be more, but these 2 are annoying. But because of my muscle memory, I wasn’t even thinking about Caps Locking when I was doing it. I know logically it is faster to use the Shift key but I wasn’t even trying to use the shift for anything beyond symbols.
If you are reading this, give practicing your keyboard skills a chance and see what you might be doing in-efficiently so you can become better.
Sidenote: I haven’t dived deep into this rabbit hole yet, but there is a fanatical keyboard sub culture complete with touch and audio sensitivity (how does it feel to press the button and how does it clack when you release it?) as well as LED lighting, mechanical responsiveness, and so much more.
See [crap. used Caps Lock there] below link for more
So as with everything we do repeatedly, sometimes humans become more efficient. Just take a quick youtube for “fast workers”
And other times our brains begin to get lazy and we atrophy our efficiency over time.
So my final thought is don’t dismiss somebody’s request just because you think you are good at it. Give it a go and see what you can learn from the situation.
Allright, enough of me blatherin’ enjoy your end of read treat!
