Creativity and Touch Typing

I am a big fan of typing ... a very big fan of typing! I taught myself to type on a manual typewriter at a very young age (I was 9, so the year was 1973), and this article expresses perfectly why typing frees me up to think creatively in a way that handwriting never did. Long live the keyboard! :-)

Typing vs Writing by Seán McHugh:

In other words, when you can touch-type, the cognitive load of writing and thinking at the same time are lessened and free up working memory for thinking — a bit like cycling a bicycle — once the effort required for remaining balanced, and changing gears et cetera are automatic, you can spend more time noticing/enjoying where you are going.  The same idea applies to things like decoding in reading via ‘sight words’, this frees thinking space for understanding instead of decoding. The absence of effort in one frees cognitive space for the other.

Would you like to improve your typing? You can try the typing games like Ninja Cat v. Zombie Dinosaurs at the Ense-Lang website, and there are many more sites online where you can find typing tests and tools to help you improve your typing.

Written? Kitten!

Yes, it's goofy, but Written? Kitten! really is fun! With this simple word processor you are rewarded for every 100 words (or you can set a higher number)... and your reward is a random picture of a kitten. And it's not just kittens: they recently added a new feature so you can get a puppy or a bunny instead. :-)

Here's the blank screen before I typed 100 words:

And here's the reward:

So, if you are looking for a text box that will reward you for how much you type, this site might work for you! :-)

Hansen Writing Ball

A bit of the history of technology of writing: this is the Hansen Writing Ball, a typewriter from around 1870, the first commercial typewriter. You can read more at Wikipedia.

So, that's 150 years ago... now try to imagine writing technology for 150 years into the future. Or will we be writing at all...?

Here's a view of the machine itself:

Passing English: Victorian Slang

Every age has its slang, and you can even find "dictionaries" of slang, like this dictionary of slang from late 19th-century England: Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang, and Phrase by J. Redding Ware. The book is free online at the Internet Archive. (And you can read more about the author at Wikipedia: James Redding Ware.)

The book also includes lots of Americanisms of the period, sayings that struck the British of the time as odd and needing explanation. 

Here are two Americanisms, for example: "gaze at the melody" (a variation on "face the music"), and "gee-ru" (euphemistic shortening of "Jerusalem"):

There is also boys' school slang, like this entry about "brolly" as slang for umbrella:

Poke around, and you can find all sorts of things. If you want to tell a story with some good 19th-century slang in it, this is a book that can help!

Image to Text

You've probably come across some image that contains text that you want to transcribe; you can use this GoogleDrive trick to get an automatic transcription of the text... it may not be perfect, but you can probably edit the computer-generated text faster than doing the whole transcription yourself:

Writers Write: Writing Prompts

Amanda Patterson's Writers Write blog is one of my favorite accounts to follow at Google+, and here is the list of Writing Prompts for December. Aren't these ingenious? I like the idea of super-short prompts... somehow, even though they are super-short, they jiggle the creative brain, don't they? For links to other sets of writing prompts, see the blog: December Writing Prompts.