The only useful thing I learned in high school was how to touch-type. It a good thing to know, even with the awkwardness of the QWERTY keyboard. (Its purpose was not to slow typists down, by the way. It was to prevent early typewriters from jamming.)
Texting requires different skills though. For some reason, the hardest one for me has been getting initial caps where I want them with the iPad. Something about the timing of the touch for “Cap” — I haven’t got it down.
The age of written (versus spoken) communication has taken us back to another time. We now know what it was like to write a letter and wait for a response. Someone posts a Facebook status update and checks back in several times a day, hoping for comments and likes in the same way that a letter writer opens the mailbox every day, looking for an answer.
As an ex-English major, I greet the rise of written communication with pleasure. I am in my strength with it.
But the rise of written communication also means the rise of the typo. Dealing with typos is now part of everyone’s life.
Typos come easily in a world of keyboards. That is why we have spell-checkers, shortcuts, and auto-correct. The purpose is not just to save keystrokes. It is to ease the typo burden. We first-worlders spend a lot of time tapping out messages on little keyboards unsuited to human hands. But computers are inflexible, and we are adaptable, so we do what we always do: adapt.
Imagine how much time goes into fixing typos, apologizing for typos, and being embarrassed by typos. The productivity drain, on a worldwide level, must be staggering.
Like death and taxes, typos are certainties. In the 200,000 or so years that modern humans have walked the earth, we have never before had to deal with typos as a way of life. But here they are and here we are, and we fix, fix, fix them.
Lindsay, I also learned touch typing in h.s. but the reason was I needed practical work in order to pay for college. We learned on a manual that had blank keys and would stare endlessly at the giant keyboard posted on the front wall. Glad I learn. These ten fingers have supported me and my family for decades. Hey, did you also learn shorthand?
Never learned shorthand, but the typing has been valuable. There is probably way to teach typing on itty-bitty keyboards — not touch, obviously — but texting requires skills.
Sent from my iPad
QWERTY, not QUERTY. Just sayin’. The typo productivity drain….. LOL! I get so tired of hearing people apologize for 1. taking time to write back and 2. typos. There is no reason a response has to be within a certain time unless the message says or implies it. Once an English major always an English major. Has English Major assumed capitalized status? I guess not. J
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Will fix. This what comes of writing too fast: typos! Though QUERTY was more of a think-o.
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I wish I had been taught touch-typing in school (I taught myself with a Mavis Beacon disc) and think it should be re-introduced as almost every job requires the use of computers now.
Personally emails and facebook messages will never be the same as receiving a handwritten letter in the post, for me, but I understand where you’re coming from. As for typos, spell-checkers can actually make things worse (as they pick up on mis-spellings that aren’t real words, not those words that look right but don’t make sense on the page) and so I feel that to not double-check your own words is a sign of laziness.
Saying that, I’ve often caught typos I’ve written on Twitter, but as it goes so fast, does it really matter as much as the message I’m sharing? As a writer I believe in correct grammar, although I am aware that texts and the like have created their own idioms, but the message is the most important thing. It’s only when the typos are so bad to render a piece unreadable that it is really an issue (just my opinion).
YOu are right: relying totally on things such a spell-checkers can lead to misunderstanding. They are meant to be aids, not standalone solutions. We adapt to typos — in our wired world there is no other realistic choice — we can read through them and on things such as Twitter they are no big deal. But in pieces meant for publication and wide audience, they are as tacky as ever.
A few (maybe related) comments:
1. Typo = typographical error. It is probably here to stay (in place of ‘literal’), but it should really denote something introduced when copy (hand- or typewritten) is typeset.
2. That said, with a blog, there may be no intermediate stage between typing the text and publication, whereas some may have written out the content first.
3. I have been reminded, in reading about QWERTY elsewhere, that I first typed on a machine where one had to use l for 1 – see how similar they are, and some confuse 0 and O, too.
4. Some do not realize that the symbol for the oxygen molecule contains an ‘oh’, not a ‘zero’, for example, or in the chemical representation of water.
5. One cannot easily read over one’s own work and see what is there, rather than what one intended. Some, wrongly, call this proofreading – that, however, denotes what is referred to in 1 (above), comparing copy and proof.
6. The Freudian slip ? – one might check an e-mail, and find that one typed ‘hear’, but meant ‘here’. The homophonic connection can be clear, but one can also end up with ‘that’ instead of ‘than’, and neither type of mistake seems revelatory, except of a sort of being mentally distracted, or switched off.
7. Why does the modern computer keyboard replicate the Caps Lock (or its position) ? Even when I typed QWERTY above, I held the Shift key down, and can one, for all that the lock gets engaged, need it more than 1 in 200 times, if so many ?
8. The Ins (Insert) key is fully as tedious – when do I ever want to overtype what I have written, except something with which I am pleased, and which engaging this key erases.
9. Not to be confused, though, with the horror of Ctrl+A and then, when there is no option to Undo, any other key…
I never have used Insert in my life (and never will). Sometimes, with using plain text, I type names of books and movies in all caps, and caps lock is useful there.
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