The Daily Novel

(You won’t find the answer til you get to the end of this blog)

Just heard from an eighteen year old American student who has reached 94 words per minute using the Dvorak keyboard layout. I first heard from him last July when he found out about Dvorak from the alt-keyboard user group on Yahoo. On 7 July he started the switch from QWERTY and had reached 12 wpm touch typing by the end of his first day. Despite taking a five-week holiday in Switzerland and starting his undergraduate degree, with all the extra work that involved, in late August he has clearly made time to practise more or less every day.

It reminded me of the comment I quoted in my first blog today which quoted Peter Preston, the former editor of The Guardian, asking why long suffering journalism students are required to sit exams twice over, ‘with a pile of shorthand thrown in’. And it reminded me of the article in The Guardian last Friday, when Simon Jenkins revealed that he did not even know there was a better keyboard layout than QWERTY.

Quite a lot of British journalism students (but not any longer those at City University) are forced to learn shorthand to reach the NCTJ target of 100 wpm before they pass, which takes most students at least 200 hours of class and practice at home to learn. If they were caused to spend the same amount of time learning typing from a disk tutorial the best of them could reach speeds of around 130 wpm so long as they learnt the Dvorak layout. Even the average ones would probably reach over 80 wpm without any strain so long as they took it steadily and obeyed the rule of not doing more than between half an hour and an hour each day working with the tutorial.

That would make it totally un-necessary for any more British students to learn shorthand. In many situations they could use their lap tops to input the spoken word. In the pub or at the lunch table they could use the texting shorthand, which, as Simon Jenkins pointed out, is now learnt by most school children. While I doubt they would reach 100 words a minute they could easily do it fast enough to take down the verbatim quotes which journalists need.

I must now reveal that my American friend started learning typing at the age of 7 and had reached 130 words a minute in QWERTY. At the rate he is going I reckon he will reach 150 wpm in Dvorak by Christmas. (He still has to use some QWERTY and his speed in that has fallen to 54 wpm.)

Sceptics will say that he has a totally exceptional talent. My own view is that it is equally likely that he was motivated to learn this not very difficult and rather humble skill. So he went on practising long after he was typing much faster than his class mates or his teachers.

So the answer to the question at the top is:

1. You have never heard of Dvorak

Or 2. You are not sufficiently motivated to learn touch typing.

Or 3. You can’t believe that you too could type at what must seem fantastic speeds.

My other site, typingbytouch, shows you how it can be done and provides a free disk tutorial to download.

Simon Jenkins, in the article referred to above, quoted George Bernard Shaw. Shaw also said something like this:

‘The world has need of men who dream of how things never were. And ask, why not?’

I dream of a world with keyboards engraved with Dvorak available in every school and every computer shop by the time my grandchildren are ready to start. We won’t get there unless a sufficient number of journalists and academics start asking the Why? question. And between them they need to get some decent research going which will prove again, what August Dvorak proved in 1934, that Dvorak can be learnt in one third of the time it takes to learn QWERTY.