Quickly recovering from mistakes
By twofingertyper - updated: 5 years, 4 months ago - 4 messages
There's a lot of talk on here about the importance of practicing to improve accuracy ahead of speed, but one thing I don't see people discuss much is how they recover after making mistakes.
Since I type with two fingers, it is incredibly difficult to quickly recover from mistakes. In general, when I make a mistake, it means one of two things:
-I hit an extra key on accident. This is generally the easier of the two to recover from, but backspace is very far out of the way and so pressing it the correct number of times and then resetting the finger I used to touch it is never simple.
-I simply pressed the wrong key, which is destined to happen even with a perfect mental map when using two fingers. If I do this, my best chance is to stop touch typing temporarily to reorient myself, which loses massive amounts of time.
Either way, I have no efficient way to recover from mistakes. I will almost always not stop touch typing purely because it loses too much time, but this can leads to disaster. When I keep touch typing, I often make one or two more mistakes in conjunction with fixing the error (especially hitting backspace too many/not enough times). It's utterly disparaging to be maintaining a great speed for a few sentences and then making one mistake which spirals into losing 40 WPM off my prior speed.
Although I admittedly make things far more difficult for myself by typing with only two fingers, I would be interested to hear how other people recover from mistakes. Do you stop touch typing temporarily to avoid one mistake potentially snowballing into many? I assume not, since those who type normally can keep their hands oriented no matter what, to my understanding. If there's anybody else here who can type proficiently with two fingers (There are dozens of us!) your input would be especially enlightening, but I am also curious about how most people deal with recovering from a mistake, both technique-wise and mentally.
By boi - posted: 5 years, 4 months ago
Although I type with all 9 of my fingers (excluding my left thumb, it's worthless), I can relate to this and it's mentally and physically inFURIATING.
When I make a mistake, I usually just press the backspace key to prevent any further damage (especially when I happen to by typing faster than usual). But sometimes, I'll press the backspace key too hard and I'll accidentally erase more than enough, and from there it just escalates into a hot mess. You said this too in your post- and I can agree that it is painful on so many levels.
Sometimes, however, it'll be the beginning of a long typing prompt and I'll make a mistake. It's times like those when I simply just, well, quit. KeyHero has angelically gave its users the decision to just stop typing while typing a quote and move onto the next one. I put it to good use.
I can't say that I have any experience with typing with 2 fingers, but I can agree that making a mistake is pretty aggravating. Unless you're on Alex G's level and mistakes are nonexistent, then I believe that every typist can agree on this.
By twofingertyper - posted: 5 years, 4 months ago
A couple of big issues for me that I don't think are the case for normal touch typists is that I often don't realize when I make a mistake (e.g. hitting one key a nanosecond before the one that was supposed to go before it) and I also rarely realize how many letters I messed up because I'll often graze one or two extra keys or even hit an entirely separate key with my other finger. I have such tunnel vision when looking at the quote that it takes me a second to see the red, despite how attention-catching it is, and correct whatever mistakes I made.
I also quit when I make a mistake at the beginning of a long quote. My average on typeracer is more like 90 WPM purely because of this. It's hard to recover from making a mistake that early, as it just knocks you out of your rhythm entirely. And for whatever reason, I tend to make mistakes on the first few words a lot. I suppose that I type a lot better once I can get into the zone and have some momentum, which makes me slow and mistake-prone both to start a quote and recover from mistakes.
Updated 5 years, 4 months ago
By galaxyfrog2001 - posted: 5 years, 4 months ago
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By weesin - posted: 5 years, 4 months ago
What's the point of your idiotic comment? It has nothing to do with the topic being discussed. Go play somewhere else
