Today, I wrote an article about chords, and while writing it I had a great idea: I need a picture of someone pressing a chord to illustrate my article. So, as usual, I searched for a free picture I could use of someone using a keyboard.
I looked through videos on Pexels for a long while before giving up. I couldn't find a single video of a chord. Not even a Ctrl+Z. Some observations I made during this short but frustrating time:
1: I grew irritated that I searched for "keyboard" but most videos featured someone using the trackpad of a laptop.
2: why these stock videos have a tilt-shift blur in them? That's a lot of tilt-shift blur! Half of the keyboard gets blurred, and perhaps that's the point.
3: why everyone types so slowly? I know it's a stock video, but why isn't there a single video of someone typing normally? Everyone was just... slowly typing keys, as if they were worried typing keys too fast would break their nails or something.
It was then I thought: perhaps they don't type slow. Perhaps they type normally. It's me that types too fast.
I went to Google search what the average typing speed was. 40 WPM. What does that mean? 40 words per minute. What does that mean? Is that a fast? Is that slow?
I tried an online typing test to see how my typing skills compared to the average. Around 60 WPM? No, that can't be right. I should be way better than the average. I retook the test. The first time was only a warm up. 89 WPM. I could do better, but I figured the test was wrong, so I stopped there.
The words are too long. I had to type a text about opossums and vegetable gardening. Those are just very unusual words to have to type. To begin with, the test is fundamentally measuring the wrong thing. It doesn't measure how fast you can type words, it measures how fast you can type the words that you are reading from the screen.
Why would I—why would anyone—type words that have already been typed, when I can just copy and paste them? Surely a more appropriate test would be measuring how many words I can type when I can just type whatever I want?
For your information, I type so fast I type faster than I can spell.
40 WPM is the average. That's half my speed. That means I can literally type two pages of text faster than 2 average typists can type 1 page of text working simultaneously in parallel.
40 WPM is the average. That means just as there are people like me who can type faster, there are also people who can type SLOWER than 40 WPM. Who struggle even to "hunt and peek" the keys on the keyboard.
I wonder if this is a reason why AI-based text generation tools like ChatGPT have become popular? People can ask ChatGPT to type their texts faster much than they can type it themselves? If so, that's very sad! I would understand if you didn't want to handwrite texts—I don't like handwriting either!—but writing is a form of expression. Delegating that to a computer is waiving your own human ability to express yourself.
Learning to type faster grants you the ability to type more words in a shorter period of time. Writing things down is marvelous. You can use tools like cherrytree to take notes and try to organize your life or your projects. Typing things out lets you reason about your ideas. I think people should type more and by typing more they would type faster.
Text can't be replaced by audio. When words are in text format, they can be indexed, searched for, sorted, and counted. When it's in audio, you would need some software to try to convert those spoken words into their textual equivalent in order to do those things, because it's simpler than trying to do them with audio as-is. People would be dependent on complex and error-prone software if they relied on audio for their notes instead of text. It sounds more futuristic, but it's also a lot more fragile.
What was I talking about again? Oh, right. They type slow.
The average person types too slowly compared to someone proficient with computers.
This is just another way people differ when it comes to computers, and another thing we need to keep in mind when considering users' skill levels. While everyone is forced to use computers these days to do all sorts of things, not everyone spends the whole day in front of one typing things, and some people almost never touch a desktop computer even if they spend all day on their smartphones.
There is really a billion different people in this world.