Sunday, January 24, 2010
I Am Not A Hoax
Someone sent me this link calling into question whether the dvorak ergonomic keyboard arrangement is what people (like me) claim it to be.
Here's a quote from the last page of the article:
The QWERTY keyboard cannot be said to constitute evidence of any systematic tendency for markets to err. Very simply, no competing keyboard has offered enough advantage to warrant a change. The story of Dvorak's superiority is a myth or, perhaps more properly, a hoax.
Here's my story. I learned to type in my first semester as a high school freshman. It was a once-a-week class. We used WordPerfect 5.0, which runs in DOS. Unlike Barbara Blackburn, one of the fastest typists to ever live, I did not fail my high school typing class. At the end of the semester, my teacher told me it was okay to stop trying after I hit 60wpm. And that made mad. I retook the test and turned in a score of 75wpm.
I did a lot of writing when I was in high school. Millions of words, tens of thousands of pages. All of it on qwerty.
Somewhere along the line I learned of the existence of dvorak. And when I did, I felt cheated. You see, qwerty is all fine and good once you learn to touch type, but it's inherently inelegant. So, at some point in my first semester of college, I started practicing on dvorak. Despite the interference posed by knowing qwerty, I was able to reach 20wpm in a couple hours. At the beginning of my second semester of college I realized that I was going to be doing a lot of writing in my life. I decided to switch to dvorak. So I wrote a clumsy macro keyboard for WordPerfect 5.0 and I quit qwerty cold turkey. It was frustrating at first. My mind would wander just a little and I'd find myself making qwerty-specific mistakes. But I'd correct them immediately. I didn't learn dvorak in a class. I learned it a couple hours and then practiced it in real life for months before I had matched my speed to that of qwerty.
Now there are times when I use qwerty extensively, even to this day. In fact, if I'm writing an email- which is rarely terribly long- qwerty doesn't irk me. And if I'm using a program with shortcuts, qwerty makes more sense. In fact, I don't even bother to rearrange the keys on my keyboard.
However, when I'm writing, sometimes for eight or ten hours at a stretch, dvorak is indispensable. Not because I can type much faster with dvorak (I can hit over 100wpm when I'm racing- something I've never come close to on qwerty), but because dvorak is effortless to use.
Let me give you one tiny example. The word "THE."
On qwerty, "THE" is typed by leaping diagonally with the left pointer finger, side-stepping slightly with the right pointer finger, and then reaching up one row with the left middle finger. Alternating motion. No great distances to travel.
On dvorak, "THE" is typed by pressing the "TH" combination- right middle then pointer in quick succession- no traveling- and then pressing straight down with the middle (strongest) finger of the left hand. Is it faster than qwerty? No and yes. No, it's not faster. At normal typing speed, it's just easier, relatively effortless. Does that make it more satisfying? Sometimes. It actually depends on my mood. Sometimes I like all the work my fingers are doing. I like that they're jumping all over the place. But after about half an hour, that gets old. And after two hours, it gets very old. So, eventually, the answer is absolutely "Yes." Dvorak is faster. But it's also faster if what you're going for is raw speed. If I'm copying something in front of me, or if I were taking dictation, or doing Close Captioning (CCers use dvorak if that tells you anything), then dvorak would allow me to type much faster than I'd normally need to if I were just trying to keep up with my own thoughts.
And there are kinds of writing for which dvorak allows my speed of thought to increase.
You may be thinking, "That's great if all you have to type is the word 'THE'." I mention THE only because it symbolizes the entire experience of typing on dvorak very succinctly. On dvorak, my hands don't move as much. I just counted how many times my fingers left the home row in the course of a single sentence. On dvorak: 23% of the time. That's right. 77% of the keys of I typed didn't involve leaving the home row. That's because, on dvorak, the home row represents the most common letters. How common? They make up about three quarters of the words that make up the English language. Especially the common words. How does dvorak achieve this feat? Here's a hint. On qwerty, only one vowel, "A," is found on the home row ("E" is actually the most common vowel in English). And one of the keys on the home row isn't even a letter. It's the semicolon. And yet, every English word contains vowels. And the dvorak keyboard has all of them, except "Y," on the home row.
Same sentence, on qwerty: 63% of the time was spent off of the home row. And I never used the semicolon once. In fact, many intelligent people may legitimately go their entire lives without even feeling a need to use a semicolon. As punctuation, it's an option, not a necessity.
Does that make dvorak faster? Yes. It does. Have there been inconclusive studies, comparing average typists to people using qwerty at speeds below the threshhold above which dvorak becomes indispensible? Yes. Do these studies measure the typing samples in minutes rather than hours? Yes.
Are there people who feel that, because they type "fast enough" on qwerty, that dvorak is a needless waste of effort? Yes. Yes, of course there are. People who aren't upset at their high school typing teacher for making them learn on qwerty because, after all, it wasn't that hard to learn. Sure.
Here's the problem. I know people who don't know how to type. People who took high school typing- for one day a week x one semester- and who don't know how to touch type. They look at the keys as they type. They do an advanced version of hunt and peck. And they get by.
Recently, I heard one of these people in an interview. He was asked why he doesn't try his hand at writing a novel. His answer? "I type too slow." A lot of people have the same story. Learning to touch type is an essential skill in our society, and yet many people don't learn it.
Remember when I said that it took me only a couple hours to learn to type on dvorak- to 20wpm- and that the rest was practice? That's the truth. Beginner typists make faster progress- and it even feels faster because they're typing actual words right from the beginning. Once you break through into the realm of touch typing, the practice part comes naturally. Qwerty takes a long time to master. It takes days of primary learning just to "get" where the keys are. Break through is not inevitable. Why? Because the arrangement doesn't make sense on any level.
Well, it makes sense on one level. Try typing the word "typewriter" using the qwerty keyboard. Notice anything strange? It's not an accident.
People who write for a living, who write articles quoting research calling dvorak a myth, are using the qwerty keyboard. They're touch typists. And they don't have a clue what they're talking about.
Why hasn't dvorak been adopted? It's simple. The people that are in a position to make such a decision already do "just fine" using qwerty. They don't see it, and they can't be shown. Like the Matrix, sadly, the only way to know what dvorak is involves swallowing the red pill and learning dvorak for yourself.
There is no faith involved when I say that dvorak is superior. I am speaking from ideal experience. I can still use both qwerty and dvorak with equal facility. I prefer dvorak because it is superior for reasons directly attributable to its intentionally ergonomic design. Speaking of that article: it is frankly unbelievable that someone could seriously suggest that dvorak's superiority is a "hoax" based on the suggestion that specific missing evidence constitutes negative evidence and the fantasy that markets don't make such big mistakes. Along with most of America, I can personally testify that they do. I don't expect people who are already proficient at qwerty will be able to make the switch- and that's most people. High school typing students don't have the right to make decisions. They do what they're told, and if they don't they don't learn to type.
However, I did it myself, and it wasn't hard. It wasn't a mistake. I don't regret it. And I know what I'm talking about. Anyone with basic math skills can see that qwerty was not designed for efficiency and that dvorak was. And design matters.
Dvorak is so effortless in long writing sessions that I can literally write up-to and past the edge of sleep. I can write in a hypnagogic state and, while it doesn't last for more than a paragraph, I can actually read what I wrote the next day and be able to track the changing of consciousness: from things I can remember to things I have no recollection of. I can not do that using qwerty.
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