Sunday, July 12, 2009

Dvorak or Not Dvorak? or: "What did QUERTY ever do for me?"

"yd. ;gcjt xpr,b urq hgml.e rk.p yd. na'f eriov"

Eight seconds flat.

"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs."

Fifty-two seconds.

Not exactly stellar results, but with only two days of Dvorak practice under my belt, I'm not entirely surprised...

I first learned to touch-type on a QUERTY keyboard when I was fifteen years old. By the end of the four-month course I was pounding out a respectable 38 words a minute. Not top of the class, but not the bottom.

So why would I bother taking on such an arduous endeavour over a decade later? Because despite an atrocious ten words per minute, I've already noticed some improvements. The fingers of my left hand hardly move off of the home row when I type. Some words (the, not, net, that, there, then) roll from the tips of my fingers faster than the 'old' way. After two days. May not sound like much, but over the course of an eight hour day, five days a week for an entire year... The potential is showing...

Just don't ask me how long it took me to type this (short) post. I don't think I can count that high.

----------

xfdokt{ ld.ao-

No comments:

Post a Comment