Traditions In Writing Systems - Distinguishing What Works From What Is Fluff

You have been using tooling to write from 150 years ago, born of the mechanical limitations of technology at the time, and told that it is the pinnacle of what we can write with today.

It doesn’t matter if you use a typewriter, a keyboard, your mobile devices, or frustratingly enter letters one after the other with a TV remote when you try to search for something on YouTube from your couch. All of those methods have the same UI for entering words into your devices: the QWERTY keyboard.

I learned the origins and usage history of the QWERTY keyboard last month, sending me down a rabbit hole of considerations about how modern writers enter their work into the tools we use most today. I ended up buying a keyboard that supports both QWERTY and stenography inputs to look into it firsthand.

Even if there is nothing that satisfying quite like the scratch of pen to paper, at some point, a writer will need to convert their writing into a digital format to stay relevant in the modern era. And, for someone like me, whose inputs on these devices never matched up to the pace at which they can think, I accepted that there wasn’t a way past this in-built limitation to the tools.

But I believe there is. However, it requires an understanding of why the tools and traditions we use in writing today exist in their current forms to best understand which ones to break, if any, and how.

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It’s safe to say that, in the Western world today, traditions are not regarded the way they used to be. Regardless of one’s opinion of the usefulness of tradition, or any subset of traditional behaviors and patterns seen in human history, there is no denying that these historical forces exert pressure on the modern world.

The same is true in writing. The “way things have always been done” in writing comes from, simply, the coalescence of people and behaviors around what is believed to be best or more effective. Without the historical context, or the direct experience as someone who watched the tradition be born, someone participating cannot know the tradition’s logic, and therefore, it is forgotten over time.

There is a famous allegory framed as actual research called “The Monkey Conformity Experiment” that saw scientists douse four monkeys with cold water if a fifth monkey climbed up a ladder to get a banana. In time, any time a monkey went up the ladder, the other four would pull the vertical explorer down and yell at them to keep themselves from getting doused.

In time, the scientists would replace monkeys one by one with a monkey from outside the enclosure, watching as these new monkeys would try to climb the ladder, and the cycle repeats. Given enough cycles, all the monkeys in the enclosure will perform the behavior, but don’t know why.

This story is meant to be an allegory for critiquing deep-seated beliefs without good-natured review. A tradition makes sense if it works for a population, but may not be the most optimal way for people on average to live, and is my point precisely with the QWERTY keyboard.

The QWERTY keyboard, named from the letters in the top-left corner of the most common English keyboard made today, exists because it was invented during a time when the configuration made the most mechanical sense. Old typewriters required mechanical switches to press the ink-soaked ribbon inside the device, the pressed key raising a type slug of the corresponding letter to imprint onto the page. If you typed too quickly on these early typewriters, the type slug didn’t have enough time to switch to the next letter, causing issues with cycling the mechanisms and overlapping letters.

To prevent this, manufacturers designed typewriter layouts that kept letters close to the fingers, but separated commonly used letters apart to enforce a slower pace through the machine’s design.

In other words, the pace of typing on the QWERTY board exists because the typewriter couldn’t keep up with speedy typists.

Typewriting started off as a high-stakes administrative technology. It saw the most adoption in the fields of accounting, governance, and recordkeeping, where accuracy is as important, if not more important, than speed. Because of this prioritization of qualities, the typewriter's limiting typing speeds weren’t an issue, but instead a necessary trade-off to ensure that good work could be done with more convenience than handwriting all these important documents.

Over time, typing became generalized in its usage, especially with the advent of the computer. With the need to input digitally, computer keyboards adopted the QWERTY layout as an easy way to bridge the typing skills created by roughly 100 years of typewriter usage into the digital workspace. In the 1960s, despite boards having the ability to read two simultaneous keys pressed (not including modifier keys like Shift or Control), these boards used QWERTY to maintain that holdover from the typewriting era.

And so, we see in this one example how a writing input method, much like many other traditions, started off as a necessary invention to a new scenario and became the norm.

Traditions start off as a culture’s response to new scenarios and exposures. The idea is that, if a culture engages in a specific set of behaviors and/or actions, and that leads to good outcomes, it is worth repeating those behaviors and/or actions so you can keep seeing good outcomes. When typewriting manufacturers saw that speedy typists caused the devices to malfunction, they changed the design, and therefore the expected behaviors, to achieve better outcomes.

As these typewriters proliferated and became the norm for typing, the design of the keyboard came with it. It was necessary for the device to work, so why not keep the system that works, after all?

The problem is that, as the computer becomes something that trickles out from the professional world and into home life, this design never came into question again. Because generations of typists before were the ones teaching how to best use the QWERTY input method, those lessons passed on, entrenching the usage of QWERTY into our devices today.

Well, except for one subset of typing: stenography.

Stenography goes back further and is an ongoing evolution of shorthand techniques to help someone accurately record conversation or otherwise fast communications by hand. These are techniques used by court recorders, live captioning specialists, and similar professionals.

Stenographers have invented several ways to speed up their input over the years, starting from swirled characters on lined paper to represent one or more words to the 23-character keyboards seen most commonly today in English-speaking nations. These inventions came to be because speed was as important as accuracy in these settings, forcing creativity outside the original designs of the QWERTY keyboard.

Thus, the existence of stenography inputs leads me to a question: if there are input methods for typing that join speed and accuracy into one technique, why did the method that favors accuracy over speed become the norm? Wouldn’t it make more sense to maximize the ceiling of typing capabilities and teach what can lead people to faster typing, rather than clinging to something that relies on tech we no longer use as its justification?

I didn’t have a great answer to this outside one concerning thought: is it possible that, once a tool becomes a tradition, we stop asking if its constraints are still the right constraints?

Before delving deeper into my criticisms, it should be known what ways QWERTY and stenography inputs differ. The design of these two input schemas represents the differences in approach to creating these input methods and their goals, making it valuable context.

Most folks reading this are already familiar with the QWERTY board and its input method, often referred to as “touch typing.” You press one key per character you want to enter from the board, with some modifier keys entering into the equation at times (i.e., Shift for capital letters or symbols, or Tab for paragraph indentations).

The idea with the QWERTY input method is that you think about what you are typing from a spelling-first basis. In order to write on these boards, you must know how to spell or, in the world of autocorrect, be capable of getting close enough for the software to suggest the correct spelling.

This structure means that any word you type requires the same number of keystrokes as the number of letters in the word. If you type in small words, you use few strokes, and the same for those using grandiose vocabulary.

Stenography differs in the unit level of its input. Rather than asking someone to spell each word that they want to type, you instead press the required number of keys to create a phenome, or essentially, a syllable. This leads to the usage of the word “chording” to describe stenography inputs. Rather than spelling out the entire word, you press multiple keys at once, which the board always reads in a set order, akin to a pianist playing a chord on their instrument.

Not many folks know that stenography operates this way, assuming they know it exists in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a large plurality of folks who believed that court stenographers just type stupid fast on QWERTY boards, especially since 200+ words per minute (WPM) typists do exist for that input method.

However, despite its association with niche professions, stenography does not appear to necessitate being solely the purview of recordkeepers. There are online communities of folks leveraging open source software and niche keyboard manufacturers to learn and use stenography in professions ranging from everyday desk work to advanced software development applications.

It does take some technical knowledge to set up, but for anyone who has changed settings on their Windows PC before, it’s no more complicated than that.

But, none of this discussion matters if stenography is too difficult to implement or if it doesn’t provide enough upside. Given the proliferation of these online steno typist communities, I disagree that difficulty is the issue, but rather exposure is the main problem.

Most everyone in my generation, and several before me, all learned how to type in dedicated classes. We learned the proper resting place for our fingers to touch type, the movements that must be practiced, and so on.

Stenography programs teaching court stenos undergo the same process, just with a different board. These programs tend to take a few years, mostly due to the need for high levels of typing accuracy in these environments.

So if that isn’t a strong argument against stenography typing, let’s look at typing paces in comparison to speech. On average, adults working standard office jobs tend to achieve around 40 WPM on QWERTY boards, with 60-100 WPM being considered good to excellent, especially for certain types of work like data entry and transcription.

For comparison, humans tend to speak around 150-200 WPM, at least in English-speaking countries. If you were to time the WPM for audiobooks, the ones considered most approachable for listening tend to have a reading cadence of 150-160 WPM, which sits nicely in the lower part of the band just outlined. Thus, humans tend to speak around four times faster than the average person can type on QWERTY.

Trained stenographers, which is to say people who have been using stenography methods for a decent period of time, can match that 150-200 WPM with typing, and have no errors. The input method keeps up with human speech, something very few people can do with QWERTY.

Now, many folks will say that touch typing is sufficient for their needs, and overall, I agree with those folks. Not everyone needs to create paragraphs of text for hours at a time like, say, I do, but anyone suggesting that they couldn’t benefit from a faster pace is incorrect because most people’s minds work faster than our fingers.

However, I don’t buy into the myth that limiting the input method to something people average 40-60 WPM at is to their benefit. Comparing the transcription speeds, composition speeds of typing, and speech rates as we have shows that there is a way to mechanically keep up with one’s ability to speak, and therefore potentially, their ability to think, just by showing these rates next to one another.

Some folks will say that they are only able to go so far as QWERTY does because they don’t “think that fast,” yet can keep up in conversation with others with minimal issues. It doesn’t add up.

When people claim 60–80 WPM is above their thinking speed, what I hear is that the usage of the QWERTY board gets in the way of their ability to communicate digitally.

In other words, it’s a statement about tradition, not about their brain. And I want to see if this theory of mine holds true.

I have an educational background in the natural sciences, having received a bachelor’s degree in biomedicine from the University of South Florida. This doesn’t make me a master experiment designer, but it gives me some practical experience in designing what I think could be one of several tests to see if stenography represents a better path forward for inputting thoughts into computers.

The goal here is to see how QWERTY and stenography inputs differ across three different categories of writing: transcription of written text, transcription of spoken audio, and generative writing.

First, you would set up three groups of typists:

Groups A and B represent our comparison groups, while Group C represents our control or baseline for what folks do today with QWERTY.

Each of these groups would need to take verified typing speed tests for their respective input methods before conducting the experiment to ensure the participants match their designated category and for standardizing the data later on through the three tasks.

Once a participant has their category determined, you’d run through three tasks:

Each of these tasks would need to be the same exercise for each of the three groups, with WPM and typing accuracy recorded across the entire session, averaged within each task, and compared to the typing speeds they achieved in the typing tests done to assign their group.

Given the research and minimal exposure that I have to stenography typing inputs, I would expect that, overall, you will see higher WPM measurements across the board with the stenography professionals than you will with the QWERTY users of both speed ranges.

If that were to be true, then the conclusion would be that current alternatives to typing exist that better allow for folks to express themselves quickly, especially if the measurements were to show that stenographers outpace QWERTY users even in generative writing. That metric specifically will show us, with more fidelity, what the gap between thinking and input actually is for non-speech inputs.

I don’t think the results of this experiment would spark a revolution in the typing world. Instead, I expect that this framework needs further refinement before it could be executed to the level necessary for accurate scientific research, let alone what the results might yield in terms of inspiration points for further research.

However, given my hypothesis, I do think that, overall, it would point to the fact that, in the case of QWERTY as English’s primary keyboard layout, there are better methods out there for people to use to type up their thoughts.

I present this newsletter not as a definitive on where things stand with QWERTY vs. stenography as the best input method. Instead, I write this because I want people to be critical of things they do and why they do them.

Many earlier pieces of mine speak to intentionality in writing. That the deliberate curation and continuation of the practice gives downstream benefits not seen in many other habits. That’s why I try to provide the frameworks and ideas that I do: in service of making those benefits easier for others to obtain.

But, even I suffer from friction in writing. For decades, I believed that I could never find a way to match my writing input speed to my thinking speed. Voice dictation, shorthand, and so on all had issues with accuracy and start-up energy.

It’s only been by looking at stenography as it can be approached today that I realized that, for someone like me, a more efficient input system would have been the better place to start when I sat down for my first typing class.

I don’t pretend to know what the results of what I’ve laid out here would be, or if they were implemented at scale, what the outlook is for future writers. But if I can convince a handful of folks to try something niche in an attempt to reduce the friction to write, that is a win in my books.