Terminalcoffee discussion
Face Off! (Less Serious)
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write by hand vs. keyboarding....XYZ PDQ LOL XO
writing by hand is slow, but when you only have one hand typing is too frustrating. i'm eating an apple and i would have prefered to write this by hand.
i have terrible handwriting. i used to have a bit of pride in it but now i just try to get it done quickly (TWSS). my writing is barely legible so i prefer keyboarding (it as called typing when i was in school) so that it is readable. i still do handwritten notes for friends when i want to convey some form of encouragement, care or the like.interesting (maybe, maybe not) tidbit: when i write i use all uppercase letters. when i type i use mostly only lower case. that just occurred to me
I only write by hand when I have to, checks, thank you notes etc. Otherwise the keyboard is my friend.
janine wrote: "writing by hand is slow, but when you only have one hand typing is too frustrating. i'm eating an apple and i would have prefered to write this by hand."You need someone to feed you the apple as you type.
The trick with using the keyboard is to learn how to touch-type. This is actually a matter of not looking at the keyboard (fingers hovering over the tactile middle keys - the F and the J)and then going back and making corrections. Eventually - after a couple of weeks - your mistakes fade away, you just forget that you are typing and you think with your fingers. Really.
i learned to type from "home row" as a 10th grader in high school. that is the first time i ever thought an older lady was hot (foxy as we said then) as mrs smith was prob late 50's early 60's and she had it workin'. dudes laughed at me for taking typing but there was 24 girls, 2 boys and mrs smith. take that you woodshop greasers! so now i still type using the correct home row configuration and prob type at a brisk 30wpm. maybe
i always wondered why the f and j were different from the other letters. i have never had any typing lessons, but i do enough typing to have learned to touch-type. not that i always do it or that i'm very fast, but i can do it.
Larry wrote: "janine wrote: "writing by hand is slow, but when you only have one hand typing is too frustrating. i'm eating an apple and i would have prefered to write this by hand."You need someone to feed ..."
that would probably have been more distracting than eating the apple myself = no typing.
Handwriting is for personal notes -- letters, "thinking of you," thank you notes, birthdays, etc. -- while typing is for business correspondence, online communication or for people with horrible penmanship.
Typing class in junior high school was incredibly useful. This was, of course, during the stone age. We used manual typewriters. The keys were all blank--no letters printed on them--but there was a large roll-down chart posted at the front of the room showing the keyboard layout. That was basically all there was to it: just hunt around like an idiot, looking for the right keys, and then, eventually, you memorize the keyboard so that you no longer need the chart. Along the way, you would get pointers on how to position your fingers correctly on the "home row," etc. Probably there are computer programs today that could make this process a lot more fun and efficient, but I wonder, do they still teach typing in school? It's a handy skill. We also had cursive script drilled into us, and I still write personal letters and thank you notes by hand if I'm using regular mail, although these days most of my personal correspondence gets done via email. I have to admit that whenever I happen to receive a hand-written thank you note, I really do appreciate it. It's a nice, thoughtful gesture.
My handwriting is awful and I don't like to subject people to it.I'm very grateful to my father for forcing me to play "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" every day. It wasn't a bad game or tool, and it has been a useful skill.
I took Keyboarding in high school, back when computers were just starting to come into general use. I learned to touch type, and do okay. I also learned ten-key, which is very handy. I wish I had a ten-key pad on my laptop every time I'm balancing my checkbook and am using the Calculator function.
My handwriting is okay, but not as pretty as my mom's. They really taught cursive back in her day. :)
my school didn't teach typing, but they did teach cursive. i was good at it when i really wanted to, other days i just wrote in the wrong direction.
I tend to hand write most of my correspondence that I send to people, unless it's something I've written online. Then it's just typed... and even then, I might write the first draft/source document on paper first. I think I have fairly neat writing, but I'm biased. I can read it, and that's all that matters to me. I do tend to smear/stamp the ink across the page with the side of my left hand, though. The ink rubs off on it and ends up all over the page.
janine wrote: "my school didn't teach typing, but they did teach cursive. i was good at it when i really wanted to, other days i just wrote in the wrong direction."Janine, did you do mirror writing?
no, my letters just leaned to the left instead of to the right, or both ways. i can also mirror write, and mirror write upside down, but i never bothered my teachers with that.
It depends on what it is for. In general I prefer typing because it is so much faster and and my hands do not cramp up. However, when it comes to journaling and releasing emotions, I much prefer writing by hand. Even though ten pages in amounts to extreme hand cramps, the release is so much more complete. Also, after all that training in high school, why wouldn't I prefer typing for typical things? We had like three classes in high school just for typing.
I wonder why schools went in for typing lessons - maybe still do. All my sons sit down at a keyboard and rattle away, making no mistakes but getting up to unheard of speeds. Yet, as far as I recall, only one of them had formal lessons.
Someone once told me--and forgive me if I'm passing along misinformation--that the qwerty keyboard was intentionally designed to slow down typists because early mechanical typewriters had a tendency to jam when operated at too fast a pace. Has anyone else heard this / know if it is true?
It's true. It was designed to minimize type bar (the things that actually imprinted the letters) clashes.Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY
To answer my own question. The real reason that people of my sons' generation (and younger)can type is that it is now fun, whereas formerly it was work.
Larry and BunWat--Good to know re: the qwerty conspiracy. I had never been sure whether the story actually made sense or not. But the Wikipedia article makes it all quite clear.Anthony, with regard to typing classes, I doubt that they are part of the average high school curriculum anymore. No need for it, really--as you say, it's fun now. But back when mechanical typewriters were the norm, a bit of instruction was, I think, useful, not just for the sake of touch typing but also to learn to type with a consistent rhythm, striking the keys using equal force with all fingers, so that there would be little or no discernible variation in the relative darkness or lightness of the various letters. Once electric typewriters became standard of course this was no longer important. And now with computers it's really ancient history.
Tempus fugit...
I love to write by hand... The only problem is that I have carpal tunnel and my writing hand tends to tire out a lot. So typing does tend to be more useful for me. Although my therapist says the carpal tunnel was most likely caused by the way I type... The irony. It kills me.
i heard that qwerty came from someone from the Olivetti family consulting a Ouija board for keyboard layout
I'd rather write by hand, especially with a good fountain pen, but my hospital is going paperless (ha ha) so now all charting is done on the computer. It is nice to be able to read doctors' notes, though.
nice penmanship using a goose quill is highly valued
I'm a really fast typer, and it's convenient and much neater than anything I could hope to produce by hand. However my writing always flows better when I have a pencil on paper, for some reason. Last night I had to write a comparison paper on The Great Gatsby novel and Francis Ford Coppola's rendition, I ended up needing to remove myself form the computer in order to do it, and once I did I was working quit fast and effectively.In part that was because of distractions from forums such as this one, but still.
In my garage I have an old Royal typewriter that my grandmother gave to my mom when she went to college (late 1950s). I used that thing to write all of my own college papers in the early 1980s.Make a mistake? New sheet of paper.
My typing is generally error free.
I took a typewriter to college, too, Phil. Also the 80s. It had correcting ribbon, but oh, was I happy to start composing on the PCs in the lab when WordPerfect came in, my senior year. SO much easier to do footnotes and citations!
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Sally, you have lovely handwriting! :) I'm glad you handwrite.
Phil wrote: "In my garage I have an old Royal typewriter that my grandmother gave to my mom when she went to college (late 1950s). I used that thing to write all of my own college papers in the early 1980s.M..."
Footnotes are stupid. APA rules.
Footnotes are fun sometimes. I'm thinking David Foster Wallace here, and also books like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. But you're right, RA, not in a term paper. Unless your word processor program does them for you, and then they're kind of cool.
i think i use chicago, but we call it the purple dragon.
::high fives and booty bumps RA::I prefer APA, big time...
I preferred MLA until I learned the ins and outs of APA, and now I can't much about MLA.
i prefer MIA. i love that song paper airplanes
I used to like ELO and BTO, but haven't listened to either in a long time.
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I'm strictly a typer, 99% of the time, anyway. Writing by hand is too slow and my handwriting is messy.