I have explained previously that I have difficulty keeping a good relationship between my fingers and my brain. I type on a keyboard for my blog and do many other things by typing. My error rate, the probability that I will strike the wrong key, one I didn't want to strike by accident, is too high. Keep in mind that I am thinking of what I do when I write for my blog or for an email to a friend: compose ideas in my head, create words that seem likely to express the ideas and type those words. I type to create, not to provide a typescript of handwritten or previously made documents.
I wrote about my history in typing in this blog post: http://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-life-in-corrections.html
But I was about 10% younger then and I have matured somewhat. I have typed a heck of a lot since then. Peter Vishton assures me that if I do any activity enough, I will improve at doing it. Maybe I have improved. I find the prospect of careful observation, timing and analysis of my typing, boring. I find the rapid correction of misspellings and fat fingering (nipping a neighbor key as well as the targeted one) fun. I guess if I could accept that I am never going to be a champion typist or executive secretary and so forgive the backspacing, the retyping and re-retyping, I might be even happier.
I am interested in error and error analysis since those subjects can lead to interesting discoveries. I know that it is the modern American fascination with IMPROVEMENT that can lead to isolating the most common errors and then working on ways to lessen or eliminate them. That is certainly a common and worthwhile approach. But there are other directions, too, as there usually are:
Freudian [how come so many of my errors have to do with calm? Am I too stressed?]
Structural [many of my errors seem to relate to using my outer fingers, not the index fingers. Does that call for a new keyboard design?]
Inventive [I often have trouble with the word 'analysis'. Can I invent a new spelling of a word that leads to fewer typing errors?]
Dr. Kaufman and some others have expressed being impressed by my "dedication" to writing daily. What they often don't realize is that it is fun. Of course I like it when you get tickled by what I write. But when you are too busy, I still get all sorts of fun. I began this post at 8:30 and it is now 10:16. What the heck? Nearly two hours to write 445 words. I just used Excel to find I have been typing about a word every 15 seconds. Slow! Very slow! But I have written to friends, checked all sorts of things on Google and learned a bunch. I make errors but normally I am not entering crucial data, like instant stock orders (where 20,000 shares was mistyped as 2,000,000,000) and desired airplane descend angles (where a pilot meant angle of descent but set the wrong gauge, the speed of descent). Look up big deal typos and fat-fingering.
