The joys of typing

You really have to be trained as a typist to fully understand how soothing it can be to have the words percolating out of your fingers.

Pick-and-choose typists simply don’t have the mind-to-muscle capacity that touch-typists have. For those of us who were lucky to acquire typing finesse, this skill can become second nature, a mouthpiece, as it were, so that the words can roll out almost as fast as speaking.

Indeed, the problem, same as people with motor mouths, can be that editing back, paring to the simplest way of expressing something, can seem more challenging than working at expressing le mot juste. Clarification, in other words, wordy and verbose, is sometimes or even often easier than cutting to the chase with the point you wish to make.

Personally, I always thought that a skill like touch-typing would have flown out the window some sixty years after I first learned, but no, it’s still valuable today.