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I think I can pretty much credit Hatrack with taking me from a typing speed of 45 wpm to over 60 and making it possible for me to be working as a legal secretary today. Along with this came the practice in watching my peas and queues.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about my participation in Hatrack, and I guess it goes with the mixed feelings I have about working out of the home right now. Though I will say that if I have to be working, I'm glad it is as a legal secretary, because I'm very happy in my work.
I think I can credit AOL with taking me from the 30 wpm range into the mid 40's. I used to host chats as a community leader. Playing piano to a metronome is something that may also have helped. I think I've heard people suggest a metronome to improve typing speed before, but I don't think I ever would have tried that.
Well, I don't know how many of you aspire to be legal secretaries. I'm guessing not many. But you never know.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I blame my mad typing skillz on playing a MUD and dating someone playing that MUD. I haven't clocked myself in ages. Maybe I'll go play some of that shark typing game.
Posts: 4077 | Registered: Jun 2003
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Whereas mine are attributable to being addicted to Infocom's text adventures when I was in grade school.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Instant messaging is what improved my typing skills. I refuse to use incorrect spelling or grammar or dumb abbreviations even in an IM, which helps.
Practice on Hatrack didn't hurt, though. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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When I was in grade school, my folks promised to take me out for an ice cream cone for each level of Typing Tutor for the Atari ST I passed. That's how I learned.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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I should clarify that the interwebnet gets credit for my speed. My accuracy is the result of high school typing class. All those stupid drills really worked.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I did have one semester of "Typing" in 8th grade in 1960. But, everything I know about good keyboarding technique I learned on a panio.
Posts: 1167 | Registered: Oct 2005
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Prodigy Chat back in the mid 90's took me from 30 to about 170 wpm. The combat system in their RP chat rooms boiled down to "whoever types faster wins." Thinking back on it, the people who RP'd there were really, really stupid.
I maintained about 150 wpm until I left college four years ago. Now I average about 90-120, depending on the keyboard, how my hands feel, temperature, barometric pressure, moon phase, hair color and marital status.
Edit: just tested on typingtest.com and got 148. Woo?
posted
I used to have a manual typewriter, and I remember my mom saying I used to really pound the keyboard in a way that made her worry about her little rolling shelf she had made for it.
There have at times been time sensitive elements to posting on Hatrack, like when the set up to the perfect ribald joke appears.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I have been a legal secretary for 6 years (hence the Hatrack handle). When I first got this job, I tested out at 91 WPM and 95% accuracy.... and my jaw hit the floor when I heard those numbers. I knew I was reasonably fast, but I figured I'd clock oh, 65-70, maybe 75 if I was having a good day. But 91?!?!
I know my speed has slowed down some, but that's largely because the bulk of my typing is to transcribe audiotapes and I have to keep going back and forth to figure out what I'm hearing because of the dictation methods of my bosses. Those online typing skill games peg me at around 85 now.
By the way, keyboarding class in school was nearly worthless for me. I could type two-handed, and I knew where the keys were, but for the life of me I could NOT type without looking at my hands rather than at my source. I got really good at watching my hands in peripheral vision so the teacher didn't realize what I was doing. Getting into the workforce and having to actually use a keyboard on a regular basis was the only thing that got me able to stop looking. Now I can practically fall asleep with the dictaphone in my ears and still transcribe at 95%+
Posts: 4515 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Prodigy Chat back in the mid 90's took me from 30 to about 170 wpm.
Wow! I didn't know we had a world record holder at hatrack!
quote:As of 2005, Barbara Blackburn is the fastest typist in the world, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. Using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, she has maintained 150 wpm for 50 minutes, 170 wpm for shorter periods of time
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"I did have one semester of "Typing" in 8th grade in 1960. But, everything I know about good keyboarding technique I learned on a panio."
I found I actually had to unlearn my piano technique for typing. Of course, I may have been using too much muscle versus hand/arm weight to play the piano.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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Oh, my boss's mutant superpower is his dictation and composition. He talks very slow, pauses every 7-10 words, and changes word choice seldom. It's like he is a master of the foreign tongue of written English.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I got only 75 on typingtest.com, which is lower than I used to be. I guess my skills have fallen off since I quit working.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:I've just tested my typing, at it is exactly 60 wpm. Not too shabby, for someone who only types with one finger on their right hand.
You finger-peck at 60wpm? Man, you could double your speed by using your left hand.
And I seriously doubt that anyone here knows multiple people who type faster than 170wpm. I average around 115wpm, and indeed that's considered blisteringly fast; when I applied for a temp job, I was actually asked to retake the typing test twice -- once because they thought there'd been an error, and once so the administrator could show the rest of the people in the office.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:You finger-peck at 60wpm? Man, you could double your speed by using your left hand.
Sorry, that was misleading. I use every finger on my left hand but my ring finger.
On my right hand, I use only the middle finger.
Odd, I know, but it works well enough for me to get by. I may someday work on doing it the correct way.
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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quote:I've just tested my typing, at it is exactly 60 wpm. Not too shabby, for someone who only types with one finger on their right hand.
You finger-peck at 60wpm? Man, you could double your speed by using your left hand.
And I seriously doubt that anyone here knows multiple people who type faster than 170wpm. I average around 115wpm, and indeed that's considered blisteringly fast; when I applied for a temp job, I was actually asked to retake the typing test twice -- once because they thought there'd been an error, and once so the administrator could show the rest of the people in the office.
You don't have to believe it--that doesn't make it any less true.
Hell, I tested myself a few times on TypingTest because I didn't believe my initial score of 148--I thought I'd gotten way slower than that in recent years. But I tested myself about five times, just to see, and I got faster every time, capping out at 165 wpm, with zero errors four of five times, one error in one.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I could probably type 170 WPM... for about a minute. Fifty minutes? Hell no.
I average in the 90s, probably. But, then again, most of my typing is in C++/C#. Does "{" count as a word?
Posts: 3486 | Registered: Sep 2002
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At least my accuracy is very high. I got 63 wpm at 98%. I was actually faster than I expected. I don't usually type to copy, which I find a very different task from typing while composing text from scratch. I suppose I could increase my typing speed if I practiced to that end, but it really wouldn't help me out that much.
Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jan 1999
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typingtest.com doesn't work for me. Oh well.
Last time I tested, about a decade ago, I was at 80-85 wpm, which I think is pretty good for, well, me.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Man, y'all type fast. This is embarrassing. I think I scored like 65 wpm, the second time through.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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I hadn't tested in awhile... 76 wpm with 96% accuracy... not bad being out of the workforce for the last 8 months.
**edited to add: Congrats pooka! I studied to be a paralegal many moons ago but haven't used it. I may go to law school someday though.
Posts: 1132 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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I did research the paralegal field a few weeks ago. It's one of those things like tax preparer, not regulated much in a lot of places. I'm happy just being a secretary, though.
What is funny is I used to have a major complex about not being able to type, because I was a literary magazine groupie in high school and I wanted to help with layout and design but they said they really just needed someone who could type. But that's kind of how it was with the bookkeeping as well. I didn't even take math in my Senior year, and I took some kind of weird Honors calculus in college where we probably tried to hard to actually understand the real world applications of what we were learning.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I'm actually still more interested in Phil's single-handed pecking at 60wpm. I can't even imagine how fast his hand has to be moving at that point.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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