I’m starting practice drills for stenographic typing. The software (Plover) and the theory/typing drills (I’m using http://qwertysteno.com/Home/) are available for free, and the hardware is cheap (and I already have it).
What I’m really curious about, though, is the value you can get out of roughly doubling my typing speed from 80 WPM to 160. There’s the time saved, but that’s offset by the time spent learning steno. Really the big benefit is time-shifting the work of typing out English words, from “in the middle of having a thought” to the stenotyping drills.
And I have no goddamn idea how to estimate the value of that, since I’ve only ever been able to get my thoughts down at roughly 80 WPM. I’m hoping that it’ll make lower-value composition worth doing. An alternative valuation is comparing salaries of professional stenographers versus administrative assistants.
I think speed-reading practice can be subjected to a similar analysis—it moves work from time-critical contexts to non-critical ones, at the expense of the next best thing you could be doing instead (obvious candidate: reading for fun).
Personally, I estimate the value of learning to type faster at approximately zero, because I can type faster (about 70 WPM) than I can decide what I want to type. How much time do you spend wishing you were able to type faster, because your fingers aren’t keeping up with your brain?
It’s less a question of average composition (deciding what to write) speed, and more a question of how much I’m keeping in memory. With a slower typing speed, I have to keep more in memory about how I want to finish the thoughts I’m having, and have more difficulty and frustration involved in the process.
In other words, composition isn’t a marathon, but a series of sprints. Each sprint is a race to get the thoughts you have out of short term memory and into storage. You’d probaply find your composition speed increase with your typing speed, as you can focus on the next thing to write rather than remembering what you have decided to write.
And I just thought of another way to estimate it—think of the difference in your willingness and ability to write things on a phone or tablet (40 wpm) versus a keyboard (80 wpm) and extrapolate.
What I’m really curious about, though, is the value you can get out of roughly doubling my typing speed from 80 WPM to 160.
You can already talk at that speed or faster. Why not invest in a speech recognition program? Even if you think speech recognition isn’t up to par yet, it will be in a few years. You could at least test if you get any benefit from increasing your speed by speech recognition, before you invest time in learning stenotyping.
I’m a doctor, so I dictate a lot. The main advantage is quickly recording information I already have. I don’t think there’s much speed gain when you’re recording and coming up with stuff at the same time.
I’m an extremely visual thinker, and have a strong preference for communicating by typing. Very, very visual—to the point where I notice myself having difficulty expressing myself verbally. I do much better without the pressure to keep a verbal continuity going, and allowing myself to backtrack and edit as I go without mucking with how the communication turns out in the end.
I’m extremely visual too. Learning to dictate effectively was a weird experience and was significantly slower at first than typing (80 WPM). A five minute dictation could take half an hour the first few times. It took a few dozens of dictations before I got the gist of it. I bet it was still easier to learn than stenotyping.
These days I roughly visualize the text in my head while I’m dictating. Corrections can’t be as easily made on the fly because the text is produced afterwards by a human and not in real time by a computer. If you’re using a dictation program, you can quickly edit the text on the fly and combine typing and dictation, so the problems you’re imagining might be more surpassable than you think.
Of course, there are other downsides to dictation like nonprivacy and straining your voice, but being able to move freely is a nice upside. Would you like to be able to express yourself better verbally? You could see this as a chance to learn.
I use a text expander, a little program called PhraseExpress (basic version is free for non-commercial use). It lets you type a few characters and expands them into a long word or phrase, or corrects typos (like Word’s autocorrect, except everywhere—and it can import Word’s autocorrect list). It’s also very handy for typing special characters. Depending on what you’re typing, it could save you a lot of time.
Start with (mostly) correct typing habits, was encouraged to start touch-typing while in elementary school, and used a computer often to do things (video games, forums, etc). I didn’t have to put much deliberate work into trying to learn how to type faster—it was more a byproduct of being on the computer all the time.
I was 60wpm on qwerty; I’d taken a couple of classes several years before, but I hadn’t done any practice drills or anything since, just normal typing. I didn’t do any specific training; I just typed a lot (it could easily have been nanowrimo or similar, I don’t remember), alt-tabbing back and forth with an onscreen layout diagram when I needed to. I agree that it sounds insanely fast, but that’s how I remember it going.
I’m starting practice drills for stenographic typing. The software (Plover) and the theory/typing drills (I’m using http://qwertysteno.com/Home/) are available for free, and the hardware is cheap (and I already have it).
What I’m really curious about, though, is the value you can get out of roughly doubling my typing speed from 80 WPM to 160. There’s the time saved, but that’s offset by the time spent learning steno. Really the big benefit is time-shifting the work of typing out English words, from “in the middle of having a thought” to the stenotyping drills.
And I have no goddamn idea how to estimate the value of that, since I’ve only ever been able to get my thoughts down at roughly 80 WPM. I’m hoping that it’ll make lower-value composition worth doing. An alternative valuation is comparing salaries of professional stenographers versus administrative assistants.
I think speed-reading practice can be subjected to a similar analysis—it moves work from time-critical contexts to non-critical ones, at the expense of the next best thing you could be doing instead (obvious candidate: reading for fun).
Personally, I estimate the value of learning to type faster at approximately zero, because I can type faster (about 70 WPM) than I can decide what I want to type. How much time do you spend wishing you were able to type faster, because your fingers aren’t keeping up with your brain?
It’s less a question of average composition (deciding what to write) speed, and more a question of how much I’m keeping in memory. With a slower typing speed, I have to keep more in memory about how I want to finish the thoughts I’m having, and have more difficulty and frustration involved in the process.
In other words, composition isn’t a marathon, but a series of sprints. Each sprint is a race to get the thoughts you have out of short term memory and into storage. You’d probaply find your composition speed increase with your typing speed, as you can focus on the next thing to write rather than remembering what you have decided to write.
And I just thought of another way to estimate it—think of the difference in your willingness and ability to write things on a phone or tablet (40 wpm) versus a keyboard (80 wpm) and extrapolate.
You can already talk at that speed or faster. Why not invest in a speech recognition program? Even if you think speech recognition isn’t up to par yet, it will be in a few years. You could at least test if you get any benefit from increasing your speed by speech recognition, before you invest time in learning stenotyping.
I’m a doctor, so I dictate a lot. The main advantage is quickly recording information I already have. I don’t think there’s much speed gain when you’re recording and coming up with stuff at the same time.
I’m an extremely visual thinker, and have a strong preference for communicating by typing. Very, very visual—to the point where I notice myself having difficulty expressing myself verbally. I do much better without the pressure to keep a verbal continuity going, and allowing myself to backtrack and edit as I go without mucking with how the communication turns out in the end.
I’m extremely visual too. Learning to dictate effectively was a weird experience and was significantly slower at first than typing (80 WPM). A five minute dictation could take half an hour the first few times. It took a few dozens of dictations before I got the gist of it. I bet it was still easier to learn than stenotyping.
These days I roughly visualize the text in my head while I’m dictating. Corrections can’t be as easily made on the fly because the text is produced afterwards by a human and not in real time by a computer. If you’re using a dictation program, you can quickly edit the text on the fly and combine typing and dictation, so the problems you’re imagining might be more surpassable than you think.
Of course, there are other downsides to dictation like nonprivacy and straining your voice, but being able to move freely is a nice upside. Would you like to be able to express yourself better verbally? You could see this as a chance to learn.
I use a text expander, a little program called PhraseExpress (basic version is free for non-commercial use). It lets you type a few characters and expands them into a long word or phrase, or corrects typos (like Word’s autocorrect, except everywhere—and it can import Word’s autocorrect list). It’s also very handy for typing special characters. Depending on what you’re typing, it could save you a lot of time.
Aside: What did you do to reach 80 wpm?
Start with (mostly) correct typing habits, was encouraged to start touch-typing while in elementary school, and used a computer often to do things (video games, forums, etc). I didn’t have to put much deliberate work into trying to learn how to type faster—it was more a byproduct of being on the computer all the time.
I got to 80wpm in a weekend by switching to dvorak in software but not hardware, forcing myself to touch type correctly.
What was your speed with qwerty? One weekend to learn a new layout sounds insanely fast. How did you train?
I was 60wpm on qwerty; I’d taken a couple of classes several years before, but I hadn’t done any practice drills or anything since, just normal typing. I didn’t do any specific training; I just typed a lot (it could easily have been nanowrimo or similar, I don’t remember), alt-tabbing back and forth with an onscreen layout diagram when I needed to. I agree that it sounds insanely fast, but that’s how I remember it going.