Re: Qwerty and Dvorak touch-typing.

["P Ferreira" ferreira@xxxxxxxx]

For anyone who is interested, I've located the following two Dvorak
websites:

www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak

and

www.dvorakint.org


The first site posts a well known anti-dvorak piece by Liebowitz and
Margolis called "The Fable of the Keys" which appeared in the **Journal of
Law and Economics** in 1990.

Lots of positive stuff on Dvorak at these two websites, including free
conversion utilities.


Phil Ferreira
ferreira@xxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Edwards 
To: XY-Write 
Date: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 2:17 AM
Subject: Re: Qwerty and Dvorak touch-typing.


>                         Michael Edwards.
>
>[Resent because the original got lost some hours ago.]
>
>----------------------------------------
>[Walter Jowers:]
>
>>As a guy who's quite a good qwerty touch-typist, I'd venture a guess that
>>the training it would take to overwrite 30 years of muscle memory would
more
>>than offset the fractions of seconds I'd save by going Dvorak.
>----------------------------------------
>
>   Well, it's not quite that bad for me: I've been typing only for about
12
>years, and I essentially learned the basics in a week, from a standard
typing
>book. I decided to try to learn it quickly, and spend many hours each day
>learning, to see if I could pick up the basics in a week or so, and that
seemed
>to work. I wasn't fast or accurate, but I essentially knew it all after
that
>week, and speed and accuracy came with further typing in subsequent months.
>   I suppose I could do it again with the Dvorak keyboard - I'm just a
bit
>worried about whether I'd lose the qwerty skill, which I don't want to.
>
>-----------------------------------------
>>Also, there's this: There will be times, I'm sure, when I'll need to sit
>>down at somebody else's qwerty keyboard and just get something done. I'm
>>afraid if I tried it with a brainful of Dvorak re-training, my head would
>>explode like that guy in Scanners.
>-----------------------------------------
>
>   Yes, that's exactly what I was afraid of.
>   Well, I've already had two opinions which tend to go opposite ways.
Maybe
>I'll just have to try it, and abandon it if I start getting the idea that
it's
>going to cause trouble.
>   I would imagine that it's not at all like trying to learn two
languages
>(which plenty of people do), because languages differ from each other far
more
>than do two different keyboards. I suppose it would be more like knowing
two
>different kinds of shorthand - and I don't know if anyone has ever mastered
and
>retained two different shorthands.
>
>             Regards,
>             Michael Edwards.
>
>
>