Typing Speed

May 18, 2009

When I say my typing speed is about 200 words a minute, I don’t mean in the traditional learn it in school way. In school I damn near flunked typing, which they made us take. Once I got out of the class I taught myself that same summer the touch-type method they were trying to get me to do, and it was good. Because what I was trying to do was type my own original stories, not copy, "The quick brown fox etc . . . " I always puzzled why I was so fast in original content but sucked at traditional typing tests. It would be decades before I got my answer to that question. It was when my daughter, Trinity, was diagnosed with dyslexia. As many parents discover the kid is not the only one with the learning challenge. Trinity is in a school specializing in her challenges and doing wonderfully, and now I know why copying text is a lot harder for me to be accurate then doing original stories. Some days I see the words just fine, but on other days the middle of the words switch around; occasionally they add a letter that isn’t even in the middle of the word, at all. That’s fun. This explains why spelling has always been a challenge and why school typing class was so difficult. So, when I say that I type 200 words a minute I mean I type that fast when I’m writing my own stuff. I don’t take off for mistakes; I just fix them if I see them. I’m doing my first story with the spell checker and grammar both on so that it highlights as I go. It had always stopped my flow when I did it before, but e-mails and twitter and such have helped me get more comfortable with all that highlighting, so I’m trying to write the new short piece this way. So far, so good.