85 years before I was born a man named Christopher Sholes created one of the first commercial typewriters. I suppose it is worth noting that Sholes was not only an inventor. He was also a politician. His first attempt used a keyboard that was arranged in the order of the alphabet. The top row had the numbers 2 through 9. The second row the letters A - J. he next row K - S and the bottom row t-Z with punctuation. The machine had a shift key and a shift lock. The problem, however, was that when one tried to type at any reasonable speed, the keys would run in to each other and their arms would collide and jam. The solution was to split the most commonly used key combinations. The result was what we call a QWERTY keyboard, the arrangement of keys used today. Of course none of use use mechanical typewriters any more. There are no metal arms to collide, but the arrangement of letters on the keyboard remains.

I learned to use a QWERTY keyboard on a manual typewriter. I got fairly good at typing, honing my skills until I could type without looking at my fingers and working my speed up to about 60 words per minute. I sometimes say that the high school classes I us in my everyday life the most are typing and Latin. That isn’t quite accurate, as I couldn’t get along without basis algebra, either. But I did learn to type and I do use that skill every day.

In 1936, two lawyers, August Dvorak and William Dealey patented a keyboard layout that kept the most used keys in the middle row, where your fingers rest when you start to type. On a QWERTY keyboard, there are usually indicators that you can feel on the F and J keys to bring your left and right fingers to their home positions. on the Dvorak and Dealey keyboard, those keys are U and H. The vowels are all in the middle row, assigned to the left hand in this order: AOEUI. The right hand gets DHTNS. For English writers, this brings 70% of keystrokes to the home row, at least when typing common words, compared to 32% for a QWERTY keyboard.

Obviously the Dvorak and Dealey keyboard hasn’t caught on. The keyboards used on most modern computers for programming and for data entry are based on the QWERTY system. Change is difficult. Learning a new keyboard would be intimidating for most of us, to say the least. One of my first smart phones (although on that particular device “smart” was a bit of an overstatement) had an alphabetic keyboard. I couldn’t adjust to that system at all. My current phone displays letters in the QWERTY order. I know where to look for the letters I need when entering text.

But change is coming. Speech recognition is becoming more common and more refined. In tests, it has been demonstrated to run about 30% faster than keyboard entry. So far, for me, the error rate with speech recognition is too high to be acceptable. Whenever I use it, I find myself spending more time going back through the text and making corrections using a conventional keyboard. It doesn’t seem to be faster for me if one considers arriving at an acceptable finished product.

I use a keyboard a lot. Just my daily journal entries constitute a large number of keystrokes. I use external keyboards with my laptop computers at home and at work for the simple reason that I wear out keyboards at a faster rate than the rest of the computer. One of my former laptops was on its third keyboard when I replaced it. I don’t take my external keyboards with me when traveling, but use them in he office.

When our children were in high school, we experimented with a variety of alternative keyboards. We had a split keyboard that allowed for wrists to be straight when using the keyboard instead of bent as is the typical position. We tried at least two different systems designed for one-handed data entry. Our son, who uses computers daily in his work, types with only one hand and we thought that one of those systems might work for him. As it turned out, he uses an conventional keyboard and has developed his own system that yields remarkable speed and accuracy.

I doubt that I will ever get away from a QWERTY keyboard. I don’t have any reason to do so. I’ve learned it and my experience for all of my professional life is that I am one of the quickest keyboard entry persons in my office. I’ve never had a secretary or administrative colleague who was quicker on the keyboard than I. It simply takes less time for me to do my own “typing.” The skills of my colleagues can be invested in other tasks.

There is another thing, however. I think that the QWERTY keyboard is paced correctly for me. Dvorak and Dealey may have come up with a system that is technically faster in the hands of a trained and experienced operator, but I don’t think I need that much speed. Even if I could speed up my keyboard skills, I cannot speed up my thinking. In fact, my thinking may be slowing down as I age. There is no need to be able to type faster than I can think.

Words are important to me and they are important in my vocation. What I say and what I write matters. For important events such as funerals, weddings and weekly worship, I need to write, edit, re-write and refine. That takes time. It is also worth the time. Because I write in my journal daily and do not edit these posts, I am well aware of the difference in the quality of my writing. Even without the hassles of machine-based autocorrect, I make mistakes in my first draft writing. When I catch the errors, I correct them, but as regular readers know, mistakes appear in nearly every journal entry.

The bottom line is that I don’t need to type any faster. Typing a bit slower might improve my work. I’ll stick with QWERTY.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!