This Dvorak experiment^1,2 has been going really well. I am actually approaching the speed at which I used to type using QWERTY, which was give or take 50 wpm. Not that impressive, I know.

I suspect my actual typing rate may be over 60 WPM, but there are a bunch of weird handicaps they impose on you at typingtest.com, which, in the interest of consistency, is the testing site
I always use. For example, once you hit space after a word, its spelling is recorded and cannot be modified. So, if you make a mistake, you aren’t allowed to go back and fix it. Also, the text they want you to type is above the entry field, which is kind of a pain. In practice, if you are transcribing something, it’s always next to your screen, so that’s not really accurate.

Anyway, below I have included a graph of my progress over the past couple months. As you can see, it’s pretty steady. I am hoping I will keep increasing at this rate until I reach about 70 WPM, and then I can boast that my typing is actually a skill. Not that I would ever want a job as a typist or transcriptionist, but it would be good for a writer or copyeditor.

I have been at this Dvorak thing for a couple of weeks now, and I have been making considerable progress. This weekend alone, I have improved my typing speed by 10 words per minute.

I admit that if I hadn’t converted my home keyboard and reconfigured my one at work, I probably would have already given up. It really takes forcing yourself to do it to make any progress. Instant messaging has become a near impossibility, and the same for typing blogs — hence the lack of new entries over the last week.

Anyway, I have found some interesting resources along the way. There is a typing game that really forces you to speed up, as well as one based on asteroid, and there are some awesome typing tests here. Probably the best online resource for Dvorak beginners is a set of lessons I found, which are specifically designed to teach Dvorak.

One of the most interesting things I have found is that the dubious claim that Dvorak allows you to type the most common words of English faster may actually be true. There is a typing test that comprises only the most frequently occurring words, and while my overall typing speed is now around 30 wpm on other typing tests, it is over 40 for this one.

Once I have been doing this for a while, I plan to post a graph of my improvement through time.

Oh, man. I have been trying to learn a new keyboard layout called the Dvorak layout, and it has been really difficult. It has taken me like ten minutes to write the last two sentences, no joke. Anyway, here is what it looks like:

I even went as far as popping all of the keys off of my macbook and rearranging them to match. The advantages will supposedly eventually be decreased risk of carpal tunnel and increased typing speed, because, unlike QWERTY, the most commonly used letters of English are on the home row, which already allows you to type 70% of English words.

It has been difficult, but I can already feel it getting faster. We’ll see.