Typing

What skill is useful both for writing a blog and for playing a MMORPG? Typing! A quarter of a century ago, when I was still a teenager, I had a course in typing on a mechanical typewriter in evening classes. What motivated me then was that I hated handwriting. I finished with a score of 170 CPM (characters per minute). Not so much later I got my first computer, a ZX81, and thus my first computer keyboard, and I've been typing ever since. As I spend much of both of my working life and my leisure time on a keyboard, learning to type has been incredibly useful to me. I have colleagues who never took a course in it, and some are quite jealous when I type fast without even watching my fingers. :)

So today I wondered if I was still typing at 170 CPM, or faster from practice, or slower from getting old. I found a nice website, TypingTest.com, where you can take a free typing speed test without installing any software, just using your browser. I was quite pleased to score 270 CPM now, or 50 WPM (words per minute). That is far from what they show in their "top 100" list, where the current highscore is 150 WPM, and the average of the top 100 is around 100 WPM. But for not being a professional typist, 50 WPM is still quite fast.

So now I can claim that World of Warcraft helps my real-world skills. ;) But in reality I have the impression that MMOs are the death of orthography. People might learn to type faster, but usually that involves spelling badly, or abbreviated. My wife sometimes calls me when somebody sends her a message like "cu l8r m8", and she needs a translator to tell her what that means in English. MMO chat already often has "bad word" filters, so maybe the next generation will add a spell checker to chat. :)