Typing and keyboarding

There's an on-line free one-minute test at typingtest.com. On a one-minute test, my score was 82 words per minute, with one mistake. Obviously there's been a big slowdown in my speed. Courtesy of a public-school district, there are free keyboarding drills. I learned to type on a pre-WWII Royal portable. Needless to say, it was not electric. I followed a book that started out with little pattern practices, not unlike piano etudes. For instance, there might be an entire page of typing a-d or perhaps a-d alternated with f-w. I never really have learned to type numbers without peeking. Numbers were at the end of the book. When electric typewriters were available, they seemed so much faster. Electric typewriters that weren't IBM Selectrics still tended to jam for some people. Apart from the keyboards on the early IBM desk-top computers, nearly all computer keyboards seem slower than an IBM Selectric typewriter. Especially unpleasant for the person who doesn't need to look at the keyboard are laptops with those non-mouse pointing devices. The pointer is in a location that displaces to one side or another some of the most frequently used keys on the board. It's so painful to see people who've never learned to type spending so much time hunting around for the keys. People who send long e-mail messages or have extensive blog entries must be among the speedsters; if they're not, they're spending way too much time on that stuff. Of course, it's a disadvantage to have your thoughts just seem to flow out from your fingertips almost as fast as you think them, with no time-delay feature. All the same, it's an excellent investment of time to spend it on developing speed at the keyboard.