The Daily Novel

Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, took a swipe at both the mouse and the keyboard, when introducing the new iPhone to the adoring multitude in Los Angeles. ‘Are we going to use a stylus?’, asked Steve, ‘No, we’re not. We’re going to use the best pointing device in our world. We’re born with ten of them: our fingers.’ Now I don’t know about Steve, but I have only eight fingers. And my two thumbs are not only useless on a phone touch screen, they are vastly inferior to my fingers for most tasks on a conventional full-size keyboard.This is not just a quibble. And this article is not just a rant. It is based on my own experiments with many methods of inputting words on to computers, since Fleet Street computerised in 1986. That includes, ball mice, keyboards like the Maltron (which uses the thumbs for numbers and some letters) tablet PCs and voice recognition. And, guess what, I have found that the most efficient tools for the job are the conventional keyboard and the conventional mouse, which is much the same as the one which was standard in 1986.But I also want to be fair to Jobs, who gave us the iPod, which I have found to be far better than its competitors. And I have not yet had a go with the iPhone. (Victor Keegan has tried one. He finds it inferior to two Nokias, but in his article in this morning’s Guardian, he pans it on quite different grounds.) I can speak, however, with experience of using a touch sensitive mobile phone. Which convinced me that my basic position on these matters is valid. The industry’s wish to sell new products, combined with man’s eagerness to buy new gadgets, means that we are going backwards, rather than forwards, in terms of efficient input into computing devices.

Still not done all your Christmas shopping? Still stuck by for something to put in the stocking of those difficult to buy for teenagers? Take advantage of the xcitybob special Christmas offer. Genuinely free. As you scroll down these words you will not suddenly find an advert for the latest hot Wall Street stock or an offer of Viagra and other medications available online.

You can download for free the typingbytouch typing tutorial. Guaranteed to enable you to learn to type using all your fingers. And with the added bonus, of learning much more quickly by using the Dvorak keyboard layout. Invented just 72 years ago but only used by a small elite. But available to all thanks to the charitable urges of Bill Gates who has made it available in Windows by just two clicks of the mouse.

You should be able to sell the idea to your teenagers, because it is a godsend for the lazy. You can really and truly learn it in one third of the time it takes to learn QWERTY. You just click on typing tutorial in the sidebar under links about typing. You can read about the history at my other site.

All you need is a blank CDROM or DVD and a small piece of wrapping paper. And you give your kids a gift that will last all their lives, as they learn to type easily, quickly, accurately and fluently. All those school and university essays will be a joy and when they come to do their Ph Ds they will not have to pay anyone to type their dissertations.

A gift that is not just for Christmas, it’s for life.

I have been so busy generating content for this blog and learning the technology that I have neglected my original purpose. Which was to make the advantages of the Dvorak keyboard better known, so that everyone, and particularly our children and grandchildren, can touch type into their computers, easily, accurately, quickly and with less strain. You can find out how to use Dvorak from my typingbytouch site, which also has a history of typing.

I have also written three blogs on the subject: Time to retire QWERTY, A tale of two tyrannies, and Why don’t you type at 130 words per minute?

Add your comments to the debate below.

(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.

Simons Jenkins, in his column in The Guardian today entitled, ‘A million fingers are tapping out a challenge to the tyranny of spelling’, launches a fierce attack on British English, which he says is ‘immured’ in bigotry. He writes: ‘Across the globe, students of English are driven to distraction by its spelling’. He contrasts us with the Americans, who, he says see spelling reform as the sovereignty of common sense. ‘For that reason the British treated it as foreign, vulgar and, worst of all, American.’ As someone who has taught some hundreds of foreign students I stand shoulder to shoulder with him on this issue. European students, particularly take the trouble to learn our language, whereas the British are still extremely reluctant to learn any language but their own.

Paradoxically the only reason the Brits can get away with saying it loud in English in every capital on the globe is because of American power. The world has to learn American, so they can understand English, even in its weird written form. Jenkins argues the case for the British to adopt the American spelling forms. That would not only make it easier for foreign students it would make things less confusing for English children and university students, who have to read, at all ages, many books (and blogs) written in American English.

There is, however, one paragraph, which Simon gets entirely wrong. He compares the British failure to reform its spelling with the failure to reform the QWERTY keyboard layout. He rightly says that the QWERTY layout was designed to minimise the problem on the old-fashioned typewriters of keys jamming when adjacent keys were tapped in rapid succession. His next sentence is quite wrong. He writes: ‘Yet even when the electronic keyboards ended the jamming problem nobody thought to reform the QWERTY layout…’

That is wrong on two counts. The jamming problem was cured long before the electronic keyboard. The QWERTY layout was invented by Christopher Scholes in 1876. Improvements in manual typewriter design gradually reduced the jamming problem and it was totally eliminated by the invention of the electric typewriter in the late 1920s.

A much better keyboard layout was invented in 1934 by August Dvorak, Professor of Management at Washington State University after extensive research on word usage in the English language. Dvorak’s layout was specifically designed for touch typing, which was not invented until four years after Scholes invented his layout. The huge advantage of the Dvorak layout is that it can be learnt in one third of the time that it takes to learn QWERTY. It also makes it possible to type 15 per cent faster and about 20 per cent more accurately.

And the amazing thing is that it is available as an alternative layout on nearly all the computers currently being manufactured by two clicks with the mouse. Only a few thousand people know that it is there. The reason it is in Windows is not because Bill Gates wanted to advocate a switch to a more sensible keyboard layout. It is there because, as Microsoft told me when Windows first arrived here in 1995, Dvorak is the only keyboard layout that has variations for people who have only one hand. So if you go into the Windows Control Panel you will find layouts for left handed Dvorak and right handed Dvorak as well as the two handed version. Microsoft told me that they had put in the Dvorak option as part of their policy of developing features which make it easier for people with disabilities to use computers.

As I suggested in my blog, Time to Retire QWERTY, here on 30 August 2006 one further step is necessary if the millions using computers are going to make the change to Dvorak. That is for keyboard manufacturers to produce keyboards which have the QWERTY and the Dvorak letters on each key. The full story about how QWERTY and Dvorak developed is on my other site at www.typingbytouch.com. Where you can also download a typing tutorial to teach yourself Dvorak.

The lesson for Simon, in his efforts to get common sense changes to British spelling, is that even the pragmatic Americans are hugely resistant to change.

Persuading the people in power to make changes in British spelling is going to be even more difficult to achieve than getting them to switch from Dvorak to QWERTY. It is unlikely that either of us will live long enough to see these changes happen. But we can set an example in the hope that our grandchildren will be taught the spelling and the keyboard layout which reason suggests is better.

I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak in the Christmas vacation in 1993 when I was nearly 60 so I know it is not difficult even for someone who has used QWERTY for forty years.

I have decided to lead by example on the spelling issue to. So I am switching to the US language spell check, so this blog will henceforth appear in American spelling. I will let readers know if the change drives me mad.

I hope that Simon will do the same thing. Publish his next book in American English which he can do at his own say-so. But also insisting that his own column on The Guardian appears from henceforth in American English. To do that he will have to persuade The Editor and the Scott Trust and probably have to face the ire of the sub-editors.

But it would be a splendid way of keeping the issue in the limelight. I am sure that not a few Guardian reading teachers of English will be sprinting in their sandals to get in their letters of complaint.

And perhaps we could both suggest to Gordon Brown that the best way for him to show that he is different from New Labour and Old Labour, and that he is in favour of sensible reforms, would be to change the name of the Labour Party to the Labor Party.

QWERTY is 138 years old this year. It was invented by Christopher Scholes in 1868 to solve the then major problem preventing people from typing at speed. If adjacent keys were typed in rapid succession the keys stuck together in mid-air so that the typist had to stop and untangle the keys.

Thanks to the power of Remington, which bought the patent from Scholes and marketed it QWERTY has dominated the world of typewriting ever since. That dominance has continued into the computer age so that all computer keyboards for English and European languages are engraved with the QWERTY layout.

Touch typing was not invented until eight years after QWERTY. But the men at Remington did not have to learn it. They had scores of women, who went off on a one-year course to learn QWERTY and to translate the dictated words, or the handwriting, of their bosses into typescript.

Today the vast majority of the millions who use computers do not have secretaries to input their words. And most of them manage with two or three fingers but they don’t know how quickly and easily they could learn to touch type.

What they do not know is that a far better keyboard layout was invented by August Dvorak in 1934 and that this layout is available on their computers in all the leading operating systems, such as Windows, Applemac , Linux and Unix. Find out how to use it by going to my typingbytouch site.
The minority who have heard of Dvorak are deterred from making the change because the computers they have to use do not have the Dvorak layout printed on the keyboard. Although once you have learnt to touch type this does not matter because your fingers have learnt to find the correct keys by touch, it is a substantial deterrent in the learning period.

Since Dvorak can be learnt in one third of the time it takes to learn QWERTY most computer users could surpass their existing typing speed by no more than three or four weeks practice for half an hour a day. But many are unlikely to make the effort until the leading manufacturers produce keyboards which have both the QWERTY and the keyboard layouts on the keyboard.

This is highly unlikely to happen if left to the forces of the free market because, although the investment required is quite small, there is no prospect of the change leading to bigger profits.

It is also unlikely that the public sector will fund such a move. Governments have many other priorities. Individual teachers, who may see the advantages of children and young people learning Dvorak, are not in a position to make the change while computers just have QWERTY engraved on their keyboards.

Change will only happen via the third way, the charitable sector. It requires a philanthropist, rich enough to fund the initial changes and to market them to a sceptical world.

Stand up Bill Gates, who has just announced that he is stepping down as the boss of Microsoft to devote himself to charitable works. The change would enable people to use the Microsoft software more efficiently. And the big beneficiaries would be the children of the world.

How about it, Bill.