Hacker News Reader

Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

60 words a minute is still very slow, when it comes to thinking speed. Unless I'm just off my rocker, of course.

This is also why folks that take really good notes by hand often have some sort of shorthand system.

My question, then, is it worthwhile to investigate some of the more advanced typing techniques out there? I'm curious, but highly skeptical.

View on HN

Does it matter? I think faster than I type, but a lot of what I think is jumbled garbage. Why on earth would I want to barf that onto the screen?

I think perhaps 2x as fast as I type, which gives me time to consider what or how I want to say something, without constraining me to the choking snail's pace that is, for example, T-9.

FWIW the article's test pegs me at 95wpm; extended tests with sneaky words usually clock me around 75wpm.

(When I meet a word I can't spell instantly, I have to transcribe the letters rather than the word, which is slower)

Don't know. My hope would be that if I could get more of my thoughts down faster, I would have more time to prune and generally edit what I wrote.

In general, I think there has to be advantages to be a bit more in step with how you are thinking and how you are typing. That is, if I am constantly interrupting my typing thoughts with my actual thoughts, and vice versa, I will go slower.

Probably matters a lot as to how you personally think. I am not a visual person, so I rarely "see" what it is I am thinking. The words are essential to my understanding some things. So, having two thought processes going both involving words is very difficult if one is constantly thrashing the other.

Make sense?

I average 140wpm without any "advanced typing techniques", so I don't think they're really necessary. I can't speak to whether or not they would be helpful, though. I do think it's very worthwhile to be able to type this fast - people speak somewhere around 150wpm on average, and being able to type as fast as you speak is useful for instant messaging, etc.

How did you get so fast? I seem stuck at around 55 wpm.

At some point I just sat down and did some deliberate practice. I'm actually still not as good at typing as I would like to be, I have some glitches like only using my right thumb for the spacebar and sometimes using the wrong Shift key. There are a lot of programs out there that will help you do deliberate practice, it's just a matter of putting in some time.

I developed speed from text MUDs. I'm the type of person who dislikes customizing my setup and prefer to play straight; as a result, I had to consume, digest, and react to pretty large quantities of barely-differentiated text in tenths of a second.

It was good immersion practice.

I thought with the advanced techiques you can get upwards of 600 wpm. I mean, the minimum to get the job is 225ish.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_reporter#Skills_and_train...

edit: Forgot to add. Just because I thought you could get to 600 doesn't mean I was right. :) Looks like 300 is still quite high.

That's a bit different. Court stenographers, along with the people who do real-time TV captions, use specialized chording keyboards (stenographs, they look like this [0]) that allow them to type words or even whole phrases with a single or just a few strokes. That's how they're fast - you can only go so far typing one letter at a time.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/AgKnqWx.jpg

Right, I thought I had read you could actually enable some of the chording techniques on a standard keyboard at some time. Though, I don't recall the story. Quickly googling isn't showing too much.

Regardless, I know I could get faster than I am. I hover just over 80 to 90. To get a lot faster, I was always under the impression that I would need something like that. I have also always thought that I have no need for that. So it works out. :)

With n-key rollover, you can use Plover to mimic stenotype chording on typical qwerty. It's been posted/discussed here a few times, so that might be what you're thinking of.

> 60 words a minute is still very slow, when it comes to thinking speed.

Well, undoubtedly... Although I don't think you can apply a 'word per minute' count to thought in any accurate manner.

After all, words are just a medium; an abstraction that we're using to convey an underlying meaning, even if we internally represent those ideas with a series of other words/abstractions/ideas I don't think you could necessarily measure 'thought speed' by attempting to enumerate those 'words'.

I have to agree, 60 WPM is pretty slow. Even at 130 WPM I still struggle to keep up with my thoughts sometimes. I don't use any special technique/layout because I find 130 to be pretty proficient, but I'm sure using dvorak or some other odd layout would improve speed after the initial learning curve.

I have the opposite problem. I hover around 60 WPM when transcribing or copying, but I often pause mid-sentence or mid-paragraph to gather my thoughts for what to say next (probably more like how to word it correctly) when writing original content.

Maybe it's a lack of discipline or practice and I'd be able to form thoughts more quickly if I were required to, or maybe I can form thoughts quickly but my typing doesn't keep up and I lose track. That said, I do the stop-to-gather-thoughts thing when I speak as well so maybe I'm hopeless.

So, for me it is that I can not really decide "what to say next" until I have gotten "what I'm saying now" out of my head and onto the screen.

That is, if I can keep an even pace where I'm typing at roughly the speed I'm saying what I want to type, then I don't do this stutter that often. However, if I am constantly getting adrift in how fast I'm typing versus how far ahead I've thought of what to say, then I stutter like crazy.

I'm assuming it has a lot to do with how you "speak" in your head. Some people (myself) do so verbally. Some do so visually.

I normally type somewhere in the region of 85-105 depending on the app, and I was only getting 85 on the app embedded in that page. It has a slightly higher frequency of long words than most colloquial speech, typical of discussion fora like this one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com