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DVORAK CHALLENGES
QWERTY
Seventy years ago, Dr. August Dvorak, an educational psychologist and
professor of education at the University of Washington in Seattle, and his
brother-in-law, Dr. William Dealey, designed a simplified keyboard to replace
the familiar QWERTY layout.
Although the DVORAK system was widely hailed as a way to type faster and more
easily, it never really caught on. Even when typewriters gave way to electronic
keyboards, typists and manufacturers remained faithful to QWERTY.
We found out about the DVORAK system after posting a story about the history
of QWERTY in last month's
edition of this e-book.
We received this email from Mike W., a television writer and director, who says
he's "a devoted Dvorak user":
After sustaining hand injuries from typing, despite an ergonomic
keyboard, I switched to Dvorak. The problems evaporated. And now, I'm the
worst kind of convert because I push my new love -- but many people have
thanked me.
The strain of typing is reduced dramatically with Dvorak. Some stats:
70% of all strokes on a Dvorak are on the home row (2nd from the bottom),
while only 32% are there on a Qwerty.
20% of all digraphs (ch, th, gh, ie, -- common pairs) are typed with
adjacent fingers on Qwerty. This falls to 2% with Dvorak. Result: fewer
mistakes.
Alternating hands is faster and easier when you type, yet many words can
be typed with one hand in Qwerty. Not so in Dvorak. In fact, NO SYLLABLE can
by typed by the right hand alone.
Best of all, the Dvorak keyboard is already built into your computer.
(It's under Keyboard in the Control Panel [PC] or System Preferences [Mac].)
No new equipment required! The computer also retains Qwerty in the memory,
so it really is just the click of a button to switch between them.
Most keyboards also pop apart and can be reassembled into the new layout.
It's five minutes work -- yet I have not done it yet because it finally
forced me to learn how to touch type. Why look at the keys if they aren't
helpful?
It's not terribly difficult to convert, although it does take a concerted
effort. One study showed that 18 hours of practice will increase your speed
74% and cut out 2/3 of all errors.
One more stat: Only about 100 words can be typed on the row that starts
asdf of the Qwerty keyboard. That number jumps to over a thousand on the
corresponding row of the Dvorak. In fact "Thousand" is one of them.
Last month's story described the reason why all the letters forming the word
TYPEWRITER are placed in the same line of a QWERTY keyboard. Of course they
don't with the DVORAK layout.But with the help of Anu Garg's amazing
Internet Anagram Server, we found that these words can all be found on a
single line (AOEUIDHTNS) on the DVORAK keyboard:
ADHESION
ASTONIED*
HANDIEST
HANDOUTS
HEDONIST
HIDEOUTS
OUTSHINE
SEDATION
THOUSAND
* We had to consult a dictionary to find out about astonied. It's an
archaic word, meaning "deprived briefly of the power to act, dazed,
filled with consternation or dismay."Which probably perfectly describes Dr.
Dvorak's feelings when his praiseworthy invention failed to make the grade.
THE CURSE OF QWERTY
The only real obstacle to our adoption of the Dvorak keyboard is that
familiar fear of abandoning a long-held commitment. But if we were to
overcome that fear, millions of our children would be able to learn to type
with increased speed, greatly lowered finger fatigue, greater accuracy, and
a reduced sense of frustration. That seems reason enough to end our
commitment to QWERTY, a bad marriage that has long outlived its original
justification. -
Jared Diamond, in
The Curse
of Qwerty. |
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