My keyboarding skills suck. “How can that be?” you ask, “You practiced law all those years and now you are an IT consultant.” To understand how this travesty came about we need to go back to high school. Way back then there was no keyboarding class. It was called office skills and included typing classes and shorthand. Very few boys took typing. This was the stone age when a lot of girls aspired to be secretaries and office managers and the boys believed they would just dictate their correspondence.
“But what about college, you had all those papers to type?” Yes there were papers, but I had been given a very cool typewriter for a high school graduation present. No, I couldn’t use the typewriter but there were friends who could, and would use my typewriter to type both of our papers. Even if I didn’t have friends to type for me, there were services that charged to type papers. In law school there was no keyboarding either. There were a few who typed and lugged their IBM Selectrics around. After law school almost everything I did, except take notes, was dictated.
Even on the computer side very little I did required mastery of the keyboard. Doing computer programming while I was in law school was done on punch cards. You used these 80 column layout forms to write your statements, and then typed the cards on a punch machine. You had to be very careful not to make any mistakes. One extra space or forgotten period would result in an error in the batch run. Even after personal computers started making inroads I really didn’t have a lot of contact with keyboards outside of gaming until our firm got Westlaw. I became the go to researcher using this wonderful new tool. Still crafting Westlaw quires was not really keyboarding.
When I left law and started working in the IT field the path I chose was not one that put an emphasis on keyboarding skill. If I had become a programmer then I would have been required to improve my skills. Companies that hire programmers want them to be good coders, but they also want them to keyboard at a descent speed. It does little good to hire a programmer that is good at coding but types so slowly that productivity grinds to a halt. I, however, went into networking and server support. You need to use the keyboard but typing 40 wpm is not a job requirement.
So now I come to writing. Now I need good keyboard skills. If I am to compose at the computer I have to type at least as fast as I write and the faster the better to try to keep up with my brain. I can’t be distracted from the flow of my writing to look down at the keyboard and hunt and peck. What to do? I have years of bad keyboarding habits that I have to unlearn and relearn from the beginning how to do it correctly. Enter Typing Master Pro. Now I have tried typing tutors before, including the famous Mavis Beacon, but I seem to have clicked with Typing Master. Maybe it’s because I have developed more determination to get it right. So now each day I will take my typing lessons and when I have achieved a respectable net speed I will brag about it until the…*Where’s the damn N key grrrrr*
