I voted Touch-type well, age 46 or older. I took a typing class in 10th grade because I was taking college prep classes and was told that a typing class is a must to be able to type term papers in college. I still do 60 WPM with very few mistakes.
Plus, I learned one of my favorite sentences of all times in that class. It’s a sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet, some repeated, of course.
In Grade 9 (1982, you do the math) you learned to type on an old manual typewriter, complete with keys that got hung up if you typed too quickly. I will never forget the monotonous drone of the cassette-tape voice as we were told to type f,f,f,j,j,j,d,d,d,k,k,k…
If you were going to be a secretary (or if you needed another “arts” course) you could take typing in Grade 10, when we got to use an electric. In this class we did a lot of business letters with copies, and we all had to provide 4 colours of White Out to make corrections on the differently-coloured pages of the copies. Also an eraser that looked like a pencil with a brush on the end to get rid of the teensy pieces of paper that the eraser tore out of the paper to get rid of your mistake.
My husband took typing in Grade 11 due to a scheduling conflict, and was in a class full of Grade 9 girls. He loved it. :0)
My kids took keyboarding in Grade 4 or so, but had been on the computer for years before and had learned from Reader Rabbit (or something along those lines) where the keys were…
This is nearly identical to my story. We had a typing class in my first year of high school (1989-90), and I type just over 100wpm these days. Early access to a computer (my mom worked for IBM throughout my entire childhood) and regular access to online services (started using Prodigy in 1992) helped. I’m 36 currently.
I’m almost 35 and self-taught. I don’t have to look at the keyboard except to type a few passwords, and type 50-60 words a minute. I don’t think that’s too bad considering I’ve never taken a typing class. I’d probably type even faster if I was more coordinated, given it’s not having to find the keys that slows me down.
Touch-type well. In high school, I topped out at 122 wpm. Sometimes I’d lose a good timing, because I could see heads turning. The person in front of me and beside me would stop and watch me.
I voted “touch type well,” but I don’t necessarily use all the correct fingers for each key, so there’s a bit of the “self-taught system,” although I do use all my fingers. (For example, I use my right index finger for “b” and “n” and alternate between the index and middle finger for “m”, depending on how my right hand is positioned based on the last letter and the following letter. There are other substitutions like that, but that’s the most immediately obvious one to me. Those split ergonomic keyboards require me to adjust a little bit for that reason.)
I am a hard typer. So my letters wear off pretty fast. I can’t actually type while looking at the keyboard. When I look at it, I can’t see the letters. I have to touch type.
I’m self-taught, but I self-taught myself to touch-type properly. I type about 50 wpm if I haven’t done much typing lately and about 60 wpm normally. I voted “Touch-type well, age 46 or older.”
I’m pretty much self-taught. I did stupid typing games in elementary and middle school, but I don’t think they really stuck. My pinkies go entirely unused, and my ring fingers only get used for things on the extreme edges like shift and backspace.
I learned touch typing in the military but my actual day to day practice was largely on forms so my form suffered. I know the qwerty keyboard and mostly use 8 of 10 fingers including thumbs, pinkies not so much, and usually peek. I wouldn’t be surprised if youngsters today are learning other methods but they learn so young. And what they can do with a phone or blackberry is pretty amazing.
That might be explained by whether they even teach typing at schools anymore. I know when I went to college, we had typing classes (this would have been as a freshman in 1989/90). I believe that in my high school, that’s no longer offered, just various computer classes (which we also had, though not as advanced as currently offered, and we had to take typing first.) Even in the late 80s, our school only had the old manual typewriters for each student, with two or three electric typewriters that seemingly were never used. I was able to score 67 correct wpm on those manual typewriters. It was difficult to get too much faster than that, as the keys would jam.
Yea, the computer classes I had in high school didn’t concentrate on typing. But my computer class in elementary school focused on typing, on the old computers with old IBM educational software and silly games. And eventually, in the later grades, they combined the computer class with school projects, so that we could use the school computers to type book reports.
I hope that typing classes are offered to the young generations now, again.
I got a toy typewriter when I was about 10, I later upgraded to a real typewriter, then an electric one, before getting a Word Processor (and eventually a PC)
I can touch type, most of the time I’m looking at the screen when I’m typing, I only look at the keyboard when I’m starting to type, or I’ve made a typo
I was home schooled up till 9th grade, and my mom had been a business school type when she was young, and firmly believed in typing as a life skill. She wouldn’t let us use her Selectric, but we had “the old grey mare” which was a manual typewriter. She got her old typing instruction book from the early fifties out. It would fold out and had a stand built into it. There were typing exercises over a keyboard map, so you never had to look down. If you needed to know where a key was, just look at the map and use the correct finger. As if that wasn’t enough, she’d put stickers over the keys so we couldn’t tell what they were without looking at the keyboard map. That was truly evil. When we visit her house these days she still has an ancient keyboard, which works, but that she’s worn many of the letters off of, so it confuses the heck out of the younger kids. She and I don’t even notice it though, because we don’t ever look at the keyboard.
I spent a lot of hours on that thing, and by the time we bought a computer and got some typing instruction programs, including a game or two, I was pretty good. These days I can type about 80 WPM, which puts me in one of the higher brackets among my peers and is generally helpful overall.
