I went to college with a new typewriter in 1984, and you could hear typing in the hallway. The very next year you started to hear dot-matrix printers. I tell people I wasn’t just in the last generation to type, but literally in the last cohort.
It may all depend on how you conceive of the relationship between thinking, organizing, and presenting your ideas. I almost never write full sentences on paper, but I do turn to paper to organize my thoughts. Right this moment my dining table is covered in notecards: I hit a dead end on the screen and needed to reorganize my thoughts.
I tell my my advanced students: when you develop expertise your thinking becomes a hypertext with all the ideas linked to each other, like a cork board with red yarn linking pictures (TV trope for “obsessive detective trying to unravel a conspiracy”). But I’m asking you to write a series of chapters: you have to chart a path that lets you link ideas most clearly to tell the story you are telling today. (Maybe you’d tell a different story tomorrow, but today you have to choose one through line and stick to it.)
This caused me to think about how much my life has been shaped by typing going back three generations and 100 years, even though I never learned proper skill.
Yes, going back to iListen and Dragon Dictate, but it was never a useful method for me. The unbeatable advantage of writing out thoughts is it imposes a sequential order and clarity, if my mind wanders I can just pick up the pen until I have things back in order. When that happens with speech to text, there's no effective way for me to get the idea back in shape. I want my mind to wander and I want to get something clear out of that.
I went to college with a new typewriter in 1984, and you could hear typing in the hallway. The very next year you started to hear dot-matrix printers. I tell people I wasn’t just in the last generation to type, but literally in the last cohort.
It may all depend on how you conceive of the relationship between thinking, organizing, and presenting your ideas. I almost never write full sentences on paper, but I do turn to paper to organize my thoughts. Right this moment my dining table is covered in notecards: I hit a dead end on the screen and needed to reorganize my thoughts.
I tell my my advanced students: when you develop expertise your thinking becomes a hypertext with all the ideas linked to each other, like a cork board with red yarn linking pictures (TV trope for “obsessive detective trying to unravel a conspiracy”). But I’m asking you to write a series of chapters: you have to chart a path that lets you link ideas most clearly to tell the story you are telling today. (Maybe you’d tell a different story tomorrow, but today you have to choose one through line and stick to it.)
Touch typing and drivers' ed – the most useful courses I took in high school
This caused me to think about how much my life has been shaped by typing going back three generations and 100 years, even though I never learned proper skill.
Have you tried speech to text?
Yes, going back to iListen and Dragon Dictate, but it was never a useful method for me. The unbeatable advantage of writing out thoughts is it imposes a sequential order and clarity, if my mind wanders I can just pick up the pen until I have things back in order. When that happens with speech to text, there's no effective way for me to get the idea back in shape. I want my mind to wander and I want to get something clear out of that.