He Was The Fastest Typist in These Parts... a tale of the ol' West
The year was1998. He swaggered into the room like a gunslinger trudging the streets of Tombstone. His typing was fast -- very fast...
By Karl BarksdaleSpeaking Solutions © 2002
The year was1998. He swaggered into the room like a gunslinger trudging the streets of Tombstone. His typing was fast -- very fast. Over 68 wpm in the seventh grade. Typing fast enough to make a keyboarding teacher proud. By the time he left eighth grade he hit 107 wpm with over 90 percent accuracy on a three-minute timing. When he slowed down to the 90s, he was accurate, very accurate.
The product of home coaching and intensive elementary keyboarding courses, Mark (whose name has been changed) was the fastest there has ever been in these parts. A typing legend, he once broke 125 wpm on a 30-second timing above 90% accuracy. (He insists it was a one-minute timing.)
Back in those days, we kept our typing records on the wall. The top scores of previous years were displayed to inspire the next group of students toward ever increasing proficiencies. We have since terminated that practice because we've had three students with carpal tunnel syndrome and a dozen others with RSI, so we no longer emphasize breakneck typing speed; today we emphasize accuracy and injury prevention techniques.
Years later, Mark was curious. Did his record still stand? So he came back to visit his old stomping ground to find out.
The school has changed since his fingers ricocheted across the keys. In his day we had a small exploratory speech recognition program. There were only three stations in the entire building capable of running speech software. Antiques compared to today's processors. With only 32 MB of RAM, those old Pentium II computers and inadequate headsets were only capable of giving students a glimpse of the future. These were the exploratory/pioneering days that hardly impressed a typist as fast as Mark.
But, like the bygone days of the gunslinger, the typing era is now over. Today, every station is fitted with 128 MB of RAM, the headsets are superb, and the software is accurate, very accurate.
We sat Mark down on the new Tablet PC. In less than eight minutes he had enrolled and created his user profile. Then, we gave him an informal timing test. Mark was well over 140 wpm with 96 percent accuracy.
Suddenly, Mark understood that every student in today's speech recognition class, after only a few days of practice, can voice-type faster and as accurately as he can type. And, when practicing proper pronunciation and error correction techniques, the current speech students are consistently more accurate. It's as if the settlers, farmers, and sheepherders have moved into wild West and brought civilization to the computer frontier. Mark's typing ways are coming to an end.
After I became acutely aware of the dangers of continued and prolonged typing, I worried about Mark. His visit gave me a chance to make amends. I finally had a chance to discuss with him the potential of injury due to rapid and sustained typing. I encouraged him to reduce his typing by at least 50 percent to preserve his fingers, hands, and wrists. He spent over an hour at the school, first experimenting with speech, and then playing with the handwriting recognition...
But that's another story.