After twenty plus years of of interacting with computers i have finally knuckled down and decided to learn to touch type.
It is one of those things that i have made half-hearted attempts at before but could never commit myself to. I always got too frustrated with trying to keep my fingers in one place for any length of time. Considering i got my first typewriter when i was sixteen it is not like i have in issue with keyboards or anything. Nor am i a member of the one finger school of typing. I am one of your head down bum up, whatever finger is available, kind of typist. All verve and passion but sweet F.A. in terms of accuracy and elegance. The other thing i started realising is that because i was still in essence have to pick keys out, deciding which one to strike with which finger, my brain was always having to think about two things at once. This is decidedly not efficient. As a tablet PC user this lack of efficiency was reinforced by the ease with ideas can be expressed when writing by hand.
So for the past month i have slowly been working on my touch typing skills. From somewhere i have found the patience to persevere and gradually my fingers are being tamed. Caps are still proving problematic, the little finger has always been the least disciplined of the bunch, and i have to tackle numbers, but it is getting there.
What i am finding interesting about the process is how, as with handwriting, one starts moving away from thinking about typing as the hitting of individual keys. Instead i am finding that words are being defined as set of finger movements. I think of a word and my fingers "know" the pattern to create that word. As a former musician i shouldn't be surprised by this but at the same time it is worth remembering and perceiving these processes at work.
