I’m a bit older so I was hunt/peck/look at the keyboard until I got into high school and learned touch typing correctly and suddenly realized how much it helped in parser games.
I’m older, so I suspect when I was a child, formal typing instruction was probably something men never thought about learning since “they’d have a secretary to do it for them” but home computers became available when I was 9-10 and were primarily a “guy” thing so by the time I reached high school, the skill-based typing class was attended by all genders (and considered an “easy B” by the less-motivated students.)
For reference, when I was in grade school it was supremely rare to have a computer (usually an Apple 2e) in any classroom. In 5th grade a took a summer “computer class” which was the first time we had time with a computer where we didn’t have to share and about when my dad got one for home use. Not until 7th grade did we have a “computer lab” with about 12 Apple 2e’s that occasionally we’d get walked to so an entire class would have a lesson and we’d have to share with like three other people. One might get wheeled into the science classes for demonstrations. One of the English teachers adjacent to the computer room gave permission for me (and eventually a few others who discovered this) to voluntarily stay after school and have solo access to a computer during her after-class hours up to 4pm since she was responsible for locking her classroom and the lab.
Second grade, I learned with Keyboarding Without Tears through the school (do not recommend, by the way). The year after, the school realized how much KBWT sucked, so we moved on to TypingClub, where I learned the majority of my typing skills. I now average 100-125wpm, depending on the day and keyboard.
I’m definitely faster on a computer keyboard than on a touchscreen.
Here are my typing test results and some notes:
Laptop
I more or less type how you’re “supposed” to. The major deviations:
I exclusively press space with my right
I exclusively shift with my left
I use option + delete sometimes to delete the whole word at once
I sometimes slide my fingers (e.g. to write “ed” I would slide my left middle finger downwards).
Strangely, I use most of my fingers on my right hand but only the middle three fingers on my left hand. Space is still only with my right hand. I did a lot more tablet typing in middle school, when we had a one-to-one student-tablet ratio, but it’s gotten rustier now.
I hold my phone cradled in my left hand, resting on my pinky and typing with both thumbs. In real life, though, I use autocorrect more extensively, so this isn’t completely accurate.
I do these things as well, but I didn’t think anything of them until fairly recently when I started trying to teach my son typing. The practice course I got instructed the student to use either hand for these, which surprised me a bit. I have no idea now if I specifically learned typing that way or if I just subconsciously decided it was more efficient to always use the same hand for those functions.
Also, just noticed: my right hand is tilted about 45 degrees, with the “home row” being JIOP (on QWERTY) instead of JKL;. Not quite sure when/why this happened, other than it feels better ergonomically (wrist is in a natural position, easy to reach delete key, don’t need right shift anyways). My left hand sits at 20-30 degrees.
I have a small hand, and the right one is uniquely well placed: thumb above space, altgr reachable by flexing the thumb, the three middle fingrers hovering above K, O-P and the two keys where are, on .it keyboards, [{ +* ]} (hence having altGr by flexing the thumb matters…) and the pinky has The Last Word (that is, hovers above CR and BS…)
Obviously it’s possible to get fast with any technique. Watching this video and the one below, it almost appears like touch-typing but only neglecting to use other fingers. My only concern in the videos above and below is two-fingering appears to require a lot of wrist and sometimes arm movement to reposition hands to hit every key with the index fingers, where touch typing ideally keeps your wrists in place and relies on finger dexterity instead of larger hand movements. Part of the technique of touch-typing is to prevent repetitive stress injury or the dreaded carpal-tunnel syndrome.
I’m sure it would be probably difficult for an adult to unlearn this technique for a different one.
Stephen King is an avowed two-finger typist. I’ve seen a brief video of him at the word processor and he appeared to type fast. He’s also allegedly the first novelist historically to complete an entire book using a word processor (a $14k Wang circa 1982.)
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but home computers became available when I was 9-10 and were primarily a “guy” thing so by the time I reached high school, the skill-based typing class was attended by all genders (and considered an “easy B” by the less-motivated students.)
