[STEAM] Turns out I’m a better typist than most at the New York Times, and it’s probably thanks to video games

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No matter what you think of the coverage, you have to tip your cap to journalists working at the largest publications in the world. At the very least, their secondary skills have to be top-notch. From quick research to fast typing, to the patience of a saint needed to conduct a phone interview, or just masters of multitasking—there's no way they are just like the rest of us, right?

Then I read an article about

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earlier this week, and my world was rocked.

They are slower than you'd think

"The average speed among the participating Times journalists was about 80 words per minute — double the average typing speed in the United States, according to the American Society of Administrative Professionals," reads the key insight of the article.

Okay, very funny, give me the actual number. Wait, what, really?

I'm not even sure where to start. 40 WPM being the average in the US was already a shocking insight to me—basically saying that a middling typist would take a whole minute to type out the quoted paragraph above. (And that's just the average! Many are even slower than this!)

The NYT article sketches a fascinating generational difference, too, one that surprisingly goes both ways. You'd expect older journalists to be on the slower side, and some did definitely lose a step when transitioning from the typewriter to the keyboard, but they nevertheless maintain above-average stats.

There's also the question of whether you had keyboarding classes or not. "Many baby boomers and Gen X-ers took keyboarding classes in high school, while some millennials had learned as early as third grade," reads the article, which made my stomach churn a little, thinking back to my single keyboarding class in Year 10. Thing is, that was a mere blip in my typing evolution.

Above average, really?

Nothing breathtaking though: I'm reliably clearing 100, maybe 110 on a good day—a figure that would apparently put me in the upper portion of the NYT newsroom—and I never thought of myself as a particularly excellent typist,

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From 0 to 100 in just a few seconds. Screenshot by Destructoid Then again, I'm the sort of ****** who enjoys booting up TypeRacer from time to time, and had a genuinely good time with the aforementioned battle royale typing game. And I suppose I did spend the better part of a decade and a half writing and typing copious amounts of text? That also has to amount to something.

But if I dig deeper, surely it's a different kind of APM-fest that got me to this point. What is the environment that makes you actively chase a higher per-minute count? My mind immediately goes to computer games.

APM action

RTS fans and MOBA enjoyers will no doubt agree that the more actions you can perform in a minute, the more of a built-in advantage you have, and I imagine no other environment can provide the kind of positive feedback loop for working on accurate and speedy keystrokes than grinding games. Accuracy being the keyword here—an underappreciated part of quick typing is avoiding making errors. Instead of having to backspace four or five times and type the same thing again, you can go marginally slower and keep progressing forward at a steady pace. And nothing punishes misclicks quite like games do.

The NYT article concludes with a sobering remark, stating that "the overall typing speed in the newsroom may be trending downward. More Gen Z-ers, having grown up on tablets and smartphones, are accustomed to two-thumb texting. Many didn't learn typing skills until middle school." They quote a reporter who genuinely finds it faster to write than to type, and she therefore keeps notes by paper and pen. You can't help but feel that a set of StarCraft 2 skirmishes would have gone a long way.

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