Slowly does it

Blistering Dvorak speed for today: 18 wpm

Which is still pretty slow but I no longer feel like I've completely lost my ability to type. I'm typing this in Dvorak and it is bearable. And it's a 30% improvement from yesterday.

I even typed some of my wip today. Given the girls are dragging their feet and not particularly wanting to play this week it felt like my brain and fingers were roughly in sync : ) .

At the moment I'm faster copy typing than drafting which I guess might be because copy typing gives the brain a chance to get a little ahead and break down the words into letters rather than having to think what you want to type and how to spell it at the same time (I'm a pretty good speller so rarely have to consciously think about that in qwerty). I'm going to keep trying to do emails and other non book stuff in dv and draft mainly in qwerty until I can get the dv speed closer to something like 35 - 40 wpm then swap to drafting in qwerty (typing qwerty in dv is weird!).

Book progress report later.

Dvorak update

Okay, learning to type differently is just a bit odd. For one thing, you realise that as a touch typist, you kind of think or see a word and your fingers just wiggle and the word pops up on screen. Learning a new system, you have to go back to seeing a word and recognising individual letters and then thinking about moving each finger to get that letter in the new system. But I guess I had the same thing happen when I first learned QWERTY (twenty years ago, yikes), so we shall overcome.

So far over the last three days I've spent about half an hour a day doing online lessons or drills and have covered the home row and the second row. Blistering Dvorak typing speed at end of Day 1 - 7wpm. Blistering Dvorak typing speed today - 13 wpm so that's at least improving. Most of the speed tests include all the letters so I get slowed down having to look up at the diagram to work out where the ones I haven't memorised yet are. Tomorrow hopefully I can do the drills for the bottom row and then it's just a matter of practice, practice, practice to get the speed up.

I've been listening to music while I type and it's funny, to some songs I can type faster (or is it some I slow down to keep the beat). Maybe I need a metronome or something.

Alternatives

One of my fellow Tassie travellers not only has a very covetable MacBook Air (pretty!) but she also types using the Dvorak keyboard layout. As someone who types a lot for work and obviously a lot writing and does get hand and wrist pain despite using an ergonomic keyboard and stretching etc, it was very interesting watching her type and seeing her hands move a lot less than a QWERTY typist.

I've read about Dvorak before, particularly a few years ago on Holly Lisle's blog but at the time it all seemed too much hassle. But I'm thinking I'd like to give it a go this time. Have been scuttling round the internet reading various articles about pros and cons and people's experiences.

I also found Colemak but even though I found it a bit more intuitive than Dvorak on a website that lets you try different layouts without switching your keyboards, the cold hard fact is that you still have to install Colemak and the day job is not big on letting us install things on our work computers (even the portable version might be a problem). Plus there's no Colemak option on an Alphasmart (and there is a Dvorak option). I use my Alphie to draft fast without thinking too much, so if my QWERTY speed drops from switching, I need to be able to use whatever alternative method on it. So I think, for me, Colemak is a no-go. Something to be put in the 'maybe later' category when I have perhaps changed from an alphie to an eee or something similar and Colemak is maybe imbedded into OSX and Windows a la Dvorak.

But I definitely want to give Dvorak a go to see if it helps my hands. I'm not sure I can do the cold turkey method because I do need to produce lots of text every day but I'm going to do some lessons and practice and see how I go, following the system suggested here. It seems like it can be harder for fast QWERTY typists to switch and I guess I fall into that category (My speed is around 70wpm when I'm stopping to think about accuracy and probably a lot faster then that when I'm drafting and don't care about typos). I don't want to lose my QWERTY skills so I'm going to try and be come bi-keyboard-al. I'm going to try and use the version that keeps the QWERTY commands the same at first. Command keys are the one thing that trip my brain up a bit between Mac and Windows, so changing the position of the keys I'm reaching for has the potential for true chaos whilst I'm still in the position of having to use both.

So let's see how this goes. I've got my mac set-up to be able to switch between layouts easily and am going to try some drills today...I'll keep you posted.