Do you touch-type?

Like so many others, I don’t “touch type” by the formally-taught method (home rows and all that, I don’t even use my pinkies), but I can produce 50-70 wpm and don’t look at the keys, so I suppose it doesn’t matter much.

61 wpm two errors. Test seemed too easy for me. I think I normally type about 40 wpm with errors. I learned in the 7th grade on a manual. In high school I learned how to do an adding machine with my right hand. I’m the only person I know who can do both. But I don’t ask either.

I am very happy that I learned this skill, and wish it had been at a younger age.

In my early-middish 40s. I took typing in high school; I figured it would be useful in the future, and it has been. Though my first degree I typed all my own papers, often with the first draft of the paper also being my last. Let’s just say that in those days, the Introduction portion of the paper was significantly longer than the Conclusion.

I learned how to type on an old manual typewriter (no letters on the keys). On Fridays, we would type to music. I can tell you that Boney Ms “Rasputin” has a great typing beat.

Oh, those Russians! :slight_smile:

(Sorry for the hijack, but I didn’t think anybody else even *remembered *that song! I still have it on a 45…) :slight_smile:

I touch type, having learned on a manual typewriter in the 8th grade, upgraded 10 years later in a US Navy Class A Yeoman school, also on a manual. Haven’t taken any accuracy tests in a long time and am now having to look at keys often and make dyslexic mistakes, like teh, and never learned 10-key. Now use only computers, of course.

Mostly. I do have to do the periodic sanity check to make sure I’m not typing, say ‘foh’ when I want to type ‘dog’, and I do have fairly frequent backspacing episodes when I simply hit the wrong key. I don’t feel the key caps to remind myself of the positioning though (the F and J keys have raised bits on them).

Never took a typing course, just learned on the fly as I was a computer science student so spent several hours a day at the keyboard (of a punch card machine). Also I worked as a keypuncher for several summers, so I’ve learned to do numbers one-handed, fairly fast, using the numeric keypad.

My folks had it on 8 track when I was a kid. Still looove that song, it’s also great for working out!

I touch type. Taught myself to touch type in the old days when Prodigy and GEnie were All That And A Slice of Cake Too. We usually did a lot of story RP’ing so being able to whip out paragraphs upon paragraphs of well-written epic story at a good clip was a Good Thing. This was also helped by the fact that we were on dialup, so I couldn’t take a long time to compose my entries of overweening greatness.

Never really cottoned on to the standard home row method of typing that they tried to beat into me in middle and high school on typewriters or 486s.

Nowadays I type about 70-80+ WPM, which serves me well as a technical writer.

27 and I’m not really sure where my WPM lies. I took a course in freshmen year of high school that taught the resting place for hands, the drills like a previous poster mentioned (FJF etc) I get practice all day doing data entry for my job. One of my coworkers recently said ‘Slow down. You’re going to catch the keyboard on fire’. :cool:

I just tested on that website at 77wpm, but I’ve been drinking tonight, so I dunno. Last time I tested sober, I was at 88 wpm at 100% accuracy. I’ve done a lot of secretarial jobs, so I’ve had time to hone my skills.

I teach second grade, and my kids do weekly typing exercises. At this age, they’re mostly just familiarizing themselves with key placement, but every now and then I have a kid who doesn’t see the point of it. I make sure to do a lesson where I’m sitting with my back to the computer monitor, taking student dictation as fast as they can throw it at me, to show them how cool it is to be able to type quickly.

7-year-olds are easily impressed.

Daniel

I’m 65 and touch type, having started in about 1960. My wife is a year younger, and learned to type in high school also.

It does strike me as amusing that I took the class just for the heck of it as a lad, but many girls were looking at typing as a job skill…I now have to do my wife’s typing for her as she has lost typing skill. (Or she is just a lot smarter than me, ala Tom Sawyer)