(no subject)

[the_rck]

All of the CampNaNo writing advice posts in the last few days have been full of things that make me flinch because doing any of them would make writing impossible for me. For example, today’s advice is to make the delete key unusable. I touch type. I’m moderately fast, varying between about 40 wpm and 60 wpm, but that includes about five backspace corrections per minute, too. If I can’t make those, I produce gibberish because the more I worry about not making typos, the more typos occur.

Admittedly, when I’m making things up as I go along, I tend toward the slower end of my scale, but I definitely don’t want to slow down beyond that.

Is it just that most people don’t touch type any more? I really adore the delete key because it’s so much easier and faster than correction tape or an eraser or whatever other method I had to use when I used a typewriter. My wpm rating went way up when I started being able to correct rapidly (without word count penalty) and no longer needed to worry about carriage returns.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

I think the point of that advice is "write Now, edit Later". But if you've got so many typos in a line that you can't later tell what you meant to say when you typed it, then that particular formulation of "write Now, edit Later" is absolutely useless.

[the_rck]

I think that a big part of it is that I was seventeen when I first used a word processor at school (I don't remember if we had floppies yet or if I had to save onto tape) and twenty by the time I had regular enough computer access to write most of my work that way. I was twenty two or twenty three by the time I first owned a computer.

Writing by hand was hard/physically painful, and typewriter ribbons were expensive. I wrote 80-90% of my high school and college papers in single drafts, so there was no such thing as going back to fix things later. Changing anything at all meant retyping or rewriting by hand everything from that point forward.

[alexseanchai]

True that.

[nanslice]

I touch type and have a regular word count of ~80 pm but I tend to not have a lot of typos. I kinda like making the backspace key off limits because I tend to second guess a lot of the things I'm writing and will just delete them, haha.

[hobbituk.livejournal.com]

I touch type when I'm on my desktop and laptop pcs but the ubiquitous phone makes you use one finger!!!

[the_rck]

Gah. Writing on a phone is so horribly, horribly slow! It frustrates me because it takes ten times as long as writing on a keyboard.