Thoughts on Typing

Don't let the title fool you, I am not that good a typist yet. :) Consistent 100 words per minute with my new keyboard layout is my holy grail and this page will be for my thoughts on reaching it. (I actually had a 104wpm score the other day!)

Effortful Repetition

I believe that improvement comes fastest through effortful repetition. Mindless repetition is probably effective too, but if your brain is not taxed at all by what you are doing then there seems to be a lot less rewiring of the neurons. How many have not used Qwerty daily for 10 years at the same typing speed? I think keeping the brain from getting bored and losing interest in what you're trying to do is very important when you want to push your performance and here are some ideas:

• Read a book while you type it. Not only will this give you an excellent excuse for "wasting" time on typing, but since the brain has to concentrate on two things at once, it should increase the mental load.
• Make a game out of it. Aim for maximum speed, accuracy, whichever. Switch around. Get a list of common English words and try to get high-scores on it. Accumulate some typing data and practice on "hard" texts for a challenge.
• Compete with your friends. Treat it like a sport.
• Other suggestions are welcome (that may be integrated in Amphetype)!

I just added auto-review lessons to Amphetype. The idea is that you type the texts as fast as you can, and then fix your mistakes and hesitant words by typing them at a steady pace focusing on accuracy and not speed:

• Enable auto-review to force yourself to switch gears with every other text. This gives a fast/slow-dynamic to the training which I think is very beneficial.

But of course, I do not mean to neglect the most important factor of all:

• Type a lot! Type, type, type, type!

Logarithmic Improvement

Remember that skill acquisition with continuous training tends to follow a log-curve. That means you will you experience diminishing returns after a certain point. You will also have plateaus and "jumps", but I feel these are often rather subjective experiences that disappear in the "big picture" under the law of averages. This is my own curve after switching keyboard layout:

The blue dots are actual data points (days). The red is a fitted log curve (my predicted improvement). I neglected this data and returned to it a couple of weeks later and found that I still magically followed the prediction curve almost exactly! The base of the log might vary between persons and skills, but once establitshed, if you keep the same training continuously, improvement rate seems to be pretty fixed.

This seems analogous to learning almost anything, including chess or the game of go, despite the very different nature of both training and skill.

Buzz About Typing

Maybe it is a figment of my imagination, but lately I have seen a rising wave in the popularity of typing, especially among programmers. There's a general buzz out there on the tubes:

• Steve Yegge: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret.html
• Coding Horror: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001188.html

And seemingly being a tiny part of this buzz I'd like to plug the Colemak keyboard layout, which is in my opinion easier to learn and more comfortable to use than both Qwerty and Dvorak. If you're planning on going all the way with your typing, why not do the switch before you start? :)

Inspiration

See also Ryan Heise's experience with switching to Colemak. He had an insanely fast improvement rate (still rougly logarithmic) when he switched layouts. Maybe you can garner some inspiration or wisdom from his experience. He wrote his own typing test too.