What to call the old keyboard and other semantic problems

The Scholes? No. You would have to spend time telling the story to everybody. The Qwerty? No. Don't like the sound of it . . not that cute a nickname. The Traditional? No. Four syllables. Too long. The Old. I like it. It's short and has a nostalgic ring somewhat like the "old country." A beloved place of the past where you may love to visit but not necessarily want to go back to live permanently. The New. The Dvorak keyboard will at times be referred to as the "new." Is Dvorak pronounced d-VOR-ak or d-VOR-zhak? Musicians will likely favor the latter -- composer Antonin Dvorak was a cousin of August Dvorak. Nonetheless, it is pronounced d-VOR-ak. The American pronunciation is preferred by the Dvorak family -- without the "zh." Musicians take note (as if life wasn't complicated enough already).

Lately, with the use of scanners and voice equipment, there is less call for straight typing. In academia, most writers have computers and do their own typing. Some other keyboard or system (Dvorak, one hopes) is sure to catch on as more people switch to it. A faster keyboard would be the one on which to bet. Scanning isn't perfected. Voice activated output? When you think about it, that's a lot of talking.

In the Dvorak layout literature, 40 hours crops up often as the time you should allot for learning (1 hour a day for 40 days). I learned the alphabet in about ten days and then built up speed. I used the metronome because the new keyboard is more metronomic (How's that for a hare-brained brilliant statement?) and moved it ahead 4 beats per minute (4m) per day. Starting at 100m, I had no trouble moving it ahead 4 beats per day throughout the learning period. I finished the 40 hours at the beginning of the Fall 1995 semester. I surpassed my speed on the old keyboard in about mid-October and then shifted the tiles to Dvorak on my Mac keyboard -- the Mac split keyboard looked good with the new setup. In all honesty my speed wasn't up to what I had expected, but accuracy was noticeably better. The spell checker stopped less frequently and I also noticed less fatigue.

What does music have to do with typing?

Music is only indirectly related to keyboarding but there are some commonalties. You use your skeleto-muscular system and you develop your skills by practice. I have come to the conclusion that reading music and typing from script are mutually helpful in hand-eye coordination. If you compare learning the Dvorak keyboard to learning a second musical instrument, you will find that it makes a difference in the degree of difficulty as to which is learned first and which one comes after. For instance, if you learn the clarinet it is then easy to learn saxophone. But the reverse in not true, if you learn saxophone first it will be difficult to learn clarinet. The more familiar you are with the complex logic of the clarinet, the easier it will be to learn the simpler logic of the saxophone. The more familiar you are with the less complex logic of the sax, the harder it will be to learn the more complex logic of the clarinet. Fortunately, most single-reed woodwind players learn the clarinet before the saxophone. Unfortunately, virtually all typists learn the old, less rational keyboard first.

At first glance, it looks like switching keyboard layouts is like transposing to different keys in music. After all, when you transpose a piece of music you are playing the same piece using different fingerings. Isn't that what you do when you change a keyboard layout? Not!! There is a big difference. 1) In music, there are strong impulses relating to psycho-epistemology that drive your neurological system. Your muscles move faster than they are supposed to. To this day, neurologists are confounded as to how and why this happens. 2) A trained musician will sometimes self-correct a wrong note before it is played. You might think a wrong note but you fingers will fight for, and often win, the right one. 3) If you play a wrong note, all is not lost. When the wrong note is played, there is a 49 percent chance that the adjacent note will be a part of the simultaneous chord. You can treat the wrong note as a grace note and slide into the right one. If the one you slide into is wrong (by now all you need is to fit into the chord) then the adjacent note to that second wrong note has a 97 percent chance of being part of the chord. You can then treat the second wrong note as a grace note and slide adjacently into the third. As long as one of the three notes is part of the chord, then you can turn it into a pretty phrase. But what happens if you end up in that 3 percent range and none of the three notes are right? Well, then I'm afraid it's a case of -- pass the egg rag please?

Nothing like this happens in typing. The closest I ever came was one time I was typing the word "draft" and accidentally hit the "u" instead of the "f" and tried to turn it into the old fashioned "draught." Ended up with unintelligible garble.

The old keyboard was designed so that "typewriter" was spelled out using the top row, thus, salesmen wouldn't have to hunt and peck while demonstrating. It was also designed to slow you down. Faster typists would jam up the old machines, so the old keyboard was made with the keys in the worst possible places. Dr. Dvorak designed the new keyboard with the keys in the best possible places. Mirror image problems seem to be inherent when you use both layouts. When I started Dvorak I typed a lot of copy from script and got to be pretty good. Then when I tried typing some dictated transcripts I had mirror image problems. It was even worse when writing my own material. We think of typing as one activity, but it seems that typing from script is a totally different skill than copying from dictation. Writing your own material demands yet another skill.