Around half a year ago, I decided to learn how to type in the Dvorak keyboard layout. The Dvorak layout is designed to be more efficient and ergonomic than Qwerty and its variants. Here though, I am not proselytizing to you the virtues of Dvorak. Rather, I want to share some of my experiences of switching to Dvorak and how that has changed how I think about learning in a broader sense.
Why would you even?
Before I had decided to learn Dvorak, I had learned many keyboard shortcuts to make everyday computing faster and easier, and was impressed by the improvements to my concentration that came with just learning some simple keystrokes. Then I read The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond (available free to read online), which impressed upon me the importance of plain text as a medium for just about anything. Naturally, an interest in plain text led me to become interested in text editors, which are of near religious importance for some developers. The first text editor I invested a fair amount of time into learning was vim. I was very impressed with vim, and despite not doing much coding at all, I incorporated vim into my workflow doing social science-y and humanities things (i.e. writing) while learning to use tools like pandoc and LaTeX. From hotkeys, I moved to plain text. Then that led me to text editors and the command line interface. At a certain point, as I was doing all these things to increase efficiency, I questioned the basic way I had been typing for 20+ years...
...so in the middle of a busy academic quarter, I took the plunge and decided to learn Dvorak.
Reprogramming my keyboard, reprogramming myself
When I began to learn Dvorak, I went "cold turkey". I turned my computer's only input option to Dvorak, and instantly went from typing more than 100 WPM (words per minute) to struggling to get more than 10 WPM.
One of the most striking things I found with this initial leap was to find out how little I "knew" about how I had typed before. Sure, I could near effortlessly execute many keystrokes in quick succession, but I was not conscious of what keys I was hitting or with which fingers I was pressing those keys. I just thought of words or symbols – and lo and behold they appeared on the screen. Learning a new keyboard layout forced me to slow down and once again become aware of very small movements.
Which finger should I use to hit which key? I never knew how to type numbers without looking at the keyboard?! The keys on my keyboard aren't laid out in a simple grid? Making the act of typing once again painfully explicit, I began to see new aspects of typing that had previously escaped my attention.
From declarative to procedural knowledge
Two types of knowledge are sometimes distinguished in psychology: declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is "factual knowledge" – something like being able to list or recite information information explicitly. On the other hand, procedural knowledge is knowing how to do something. Being able to give the names of all the presidents of the United States would be a demonstration of possessing certain declarative knowledge. Knowing how to tie your shoe is a better example of procedural knowledge. It would be very hard to put into words what is being done, though it is a procedure most people have rehearsed many, many times.
For the first week or so of using Dvorak, typing was painfully declarative. I had to constantly think about where the right keys for the characters I wanted to type were. By day 4, I could get up to 30 WPM if I really concentrated. But any slip of concentration would lead me to fall to my old Qwerty keystroke habits, which would mean making typos.
During the second week of learning Dvorak, I found that I was still able to type Qwerty effortlessly (I would try a typing speed test with Qwerty every now and then). At this point I was feeling pretty optimistic about being "bilingual" in Qwerty and Dvorak, avoiding the "Backwards Brain Bicycle Effect".
However as I continued to use Dvorak, I found that gains in speed with Dvorak were accompanied by reductions in speed typing Qwerty. I could still type in Qwerty, but I started to need to look at my keyboard. This wasn't terrible because my keyboard had the standard Qwerty layout printed on it. But it was a very strange feeling knowing that Qwerty typing had become something very different for me. Rather than being some deeply ingrained procedural knowledge, it became a task of knowing how to quickly locate information.
Additionally, as I made more progress in increasing my typing speed with Dvorak, I found that I actually "forgot" where the keys I was hitting were. I knew how to type some character, but I would need time to tell you where exactly it was. Dvorak typing was becoming procedural knowledge at the expense of remembering the Dvorak layout explicitly.
Keys to efficiency
In addition to relearning my keyboard layout, I also had to relearn the keystrokes that had become to second nature to me in many of my favorite applications. During this process, I was able to reflect on how I was hitting those keys before I began learning Dvorak (often by "replaying" by procedural knowledge and watching what my hands did). I found that my past self had been contorting my hands into all sorts of un-ergonomic positions that weren't only uncomfortable, but also slower to press than more "well-designed" procedures. So when I went around to relearning hotkeys, I made intentional aims to relearn better form (such as pressing a modifer key, like ctrl or alt with the opposite hand of the one the following key is pressed with).
On top of this, I made some other modifications to my typing that I didn't even realize were possible prior to relearning typing. Did you know that there are mulitple ways to send commands like "delete" or "escape" to your computer? I didn't, but upon learning about ctrl-c and ctrl-h respectively (works in most places on my Macbook), typing got even more comfortable. I learned more hotkeys as well such as ctrl-a to go to the beginning of a line of text and ctrl-e to go to the end of a line ef text, which work in many places outside of text editors (such as in text boxes in many browsers).
By shaking up the procedural knowledge I was comfortable with (Qwerty) I not only made my life more inconvenient (sometime I have to type on other people's computers which have Qwerty, so I type more slowly than I did before), but I also was able to become aware, and then improve upon, many other aspects of my keyboarding.
Now what?
Maybe switching to Dvorak really isn't so useful, unless you are concerned about potential injuries you may incur by typing the way you are. Typing speed is not a bottleneck in productivity for most people that use computers everyday, I imagine.
However, for the experience of re-learning, I am glad that I learned Dvorak, and I think it can be a revealing experience for anybody that undertakes it. We are "programmed" to do lots of things in the sense that we have procedural knowledge for doing many complex tasks (from washing dishes to playing a musical instrument...). Taking a fresh look at any of these procedures has the potential to make the mundane more interesting again.
Labels: learning, psychology, software