Pangrams

I'm no stranger to funny mobile keyboards.  My primary keyboard on my phone is MessageEase.  Keyboards that rely too heavily on autocorrect and prediction (Swipe) just annoy me to no end.  When I started learning MessageEase, I used a few typing games to get familiar (the makers of MessageEase itself actually provide a free training game).  There is also the game "Typing Fish" which has its uses.

After a certain point however, I just spend as much time as I can doing pangrams.  Pangrams are sentences which use every letter of the alphabet.  The page I linked is a bunch of pangrams which used to exist on Wikipedia, as the site's author explains.

Bright vixens jump; dozy fowl quack.

I mention this now because I'm trying to up my typing game.  I tried dictation software out the other day, just to see how good it was, and it's semi-useful at best, maddening at worse.  Then I decided maybe it was time to up my typing game.  I think in one of my last blog posts, about the Arc keyboard, I said I was a touch typist.  Turns out I'm not.  Turns out I can't type without looking at the keyboard.  Turns out I don't know how to properly utilize the home keys.  Yeah.

My wpm is something like 60-80.  I'd like to get it over a hundred.  I'd like to be able to type without needing to look at the keyboard at all.  Just thinking about it practically, it would save me a lot of time in the long run.  And it'd save me eye strain from looking back and forth between my screen and the keyboard.  I figure if I can consistently hit 60 wpm with my current sloppy offset hand position, touch typing should give me a nice boost.

The problem right now is that I know where every key is more or less, but the wrong fingers want to hit those keys.  Every time I hit a stride and start to get some speed using the home keys, I start to worry I'm reverting back to using the wrong fingers, and sometimes I am.

Another idea I had to type faster is to work out a shorthand, mostly disemvowelling words.  S tht stpd r wht?  That would cost me time later putting the letters back in, but the bottleneck when writing is trying to get the fingers to keep up with the brain.  If I could write my thoughts at full speed, then fill in letters later, that might save time in the long run.  I'd be re-reading it all as part of another draft anyways.

I probably won't do that.  What if I can't figure out what word an abbreviation was supposed to be?

Anyway, this touch-typing is frustrating.  I abandoned it about two paragraphs into this post.  In my defense, after I publish this post, I am going to go back to writing out pangrams, so there you go.

David