Learning Dvorak II — Typewriting Behavior
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After reading through August Dvorak’s Wikipedia page, I placed a hold on his 1936 book Typewriting Behavior, and I had no idea what I would find inside.
My plan was to skim through various parts of the book to get a better feel for how August Dvorak interpreted data and thought about the world, as well as getting a historical perspective on what parameters were salient at the time. I read the editor’s introduction and preface, then jumped to subheadings in the table of contents that I found interesting. I have sorted my findings into a two different themes below, and a number of points I found interesting.
Theme 1: Typewriting Education Reform
At the time of writing, August Dvorak was a professor at UW as well as the Director of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Study of Typewriting. The editor’s introduction also notes that in 1936, typewriting education was poor and that programs could often take 2–3 years to get students up to competent levels. Dvorak believed that the field of typewriting could benefit from examination through a scientific lens that had not previously been applied to the field — this agrees with my notion that he was one of the first and most important people to come along and try to analyze the QWERTY keyboard scientifically. Dvorak opens each chapter with a brief section identifying the best points for each of three types of readers, which shows his intended audience:
Theme 2: Division of Research into Physiology and Psychology
Dvorak demonstrated an impressive amount of research into both physiological functions of the hand and wrist as well as a diverse collection of psychological factors involved in both the actual act of typing as well as the motivation for students to learn typewriting in general. I did not the physiology sections in-depth, but Dvorak leaned heavily on contemporary research in educational psychology. This physiological/psychological dichotomy was reflected into the division of book chapters into mechanical analysis of typewriting and mental analysis of typewriting.
Interesting Findings
- Dvorak actually confirmed one of the proposed theories regarding the development of the QWERTY keyboard in multiple places of the book. On page 12, he says, “Sooner or later an answer will be found in a hidden keyboard handicap which for three-score years has made learning to typewrite overdifficult.” On page 209 he continues, “This keyboard is a crazy patchwork put together long ago in a series of heartbreaking experiments to fit keys into positions without heir colliding or sticking, and so to invent a usable machine. It was put together for a few fingers at a time when no one dreamed of fast, all-finger, touch typing. In those old days an early owner like Mark Twain called it a “curiosity-breeding little joker.”
- Dvorak refers frequently to the work of Frank Gilbreth, who was an engineer that conducted extensive research into what they both called “motion studies.” Dvorak actually dedicated the entire book to him.
- The keyboard I (and many others) now commonly refer to as “Dvorak” is called the “Dvorak-Dealey ‘Simplified’ Keyboard Arrangement” by Dvorak himself. William Dealey is also one of the four co-authors listed on the book’s spine, along with Nellie Merrick and Gertrude Catherine Ford, and the latter two I had never heard of before. William Dealey was Dvorak’s brother-in-law and was mentioned on Dvorak’s Wikipedia page.
- While I didn’t find any explicit mention of record speeds in 1936, Dvorak gave a few indicators of high speeds. “The topmost cream of the school novice championship race is no longer skimmed by speeds much under 65 net words a minute.” (51) “Any minimum speed, such as 45 words a minute, still would hardly be fast typewriting. Yet such a supply of trained motions, if it matches the standards set for hourly outputs in better business offices, is adequate to be vocational typing.” (461–462) Curiously, these numbers are actually reasonable for the modern day. According to some websites, the average typing speed is around 35–40 wpm, and the average touch typist operates around 55–60 wpm. Seeing an office worker type around 50 wpm today wouldn’t be unreasonable, and seeing good high schoolers perform over 65 wpm would also be understandable in some areas. However, I imagine that high schoolers with extensive experience on computers, particularly playing computer games, would actually be able to type over 100 wpm. I could in high school and I knew a number of other classmates that could type around my speed or faster.
- Dvorak spoke of the term “intelligent behavior” to refer to the process of adoption of new technologies and techniques in business that were better than previous standards. This is obviously a concept that’s been around forever and is still prevalent today (think Silicon Valley for trendsetters), but it’s interesting to hear it coined with a different name.
- Dvorak’s original keyboard looked like this, which is different from the current version of Dvorak installed on Windows. Note the sequence of the number keys as being 7531902468.
- Dvorak conducted extensive research into “timing and rhythm,” which seems to me to be one of his least correct findings. I’ve largely agreed with most of his methods and outcomes, and many are still surprisingly accurate for being over 80 years removed. However, this section seems dubious. He makes claims of the value of rhythm in typewriting, which has very limited applicability. The first real issue is that if you’re writing original content of any kind, the pace at which your brain will deliver words is inconsistent. Thus, I think that setting a rhythm to type is really only applicable for transcription, which has a very narrow modern application. For example, let’s say that I write an average of 115 wpm and I want to write a blog post of 1150 words. It doesn’t take me 10 minutes in total — it probably takes me somewhere between 1–3 hours, depending on how much research I still have to do. My other complaint is that Dvorak makes a number of assertions about typing to music — specifically Jazz and dirges (songs about the dead), which were evidently studied by his contemporaries. I have often chosen to study to different types of music, and while I have never applied scientific methods to determining the effects, my anecdotal evidence suggests that there has been no variation in my typing speed as a consequence. I have felt like music genre influences my ability to focus — songs with no lyrics or unintelligible lyrics (often Mandarin or German) are less distracting than songs with English lyrics, but have no reason to believe there was any direct detriment to my typing ability. This part seems like an overreach by this collection of 1930s psychologists. Below is an image of the “Type-Pacer,” a device that was basically just a metronome, that Dvorak believed improved typing.
Conclusion
As I have mentioned before, I jumped around to different sections of this book and skimmed its contents for about an hour, so I am not qualified to give a review or rating of the book as a whole. However, from what I read, I completely believe that Dvorak was a dedicated psychologist and designer, and utilized large quantities of academic resources and time in his mission to redesign the keyboard. Thus, I feel as though I owe it to him to try out the simplified keyboard he designed to honor the amount of time he put into designing it. I will conclude this series with part 3 sometime in the future once I completely switch over to Dvorak for everyday use. In the meantime, catch me practicing on learn.dvorak.nl.
