[WRITING] "Speedy typing kills student essays as words spew out faster than thoughts, study shows"

[rfmcdonald]

The National Post hosts Tom Spears' Ottawa Citizen article noting a downside to typing too quickly. (For the record, I can breach 100 WPM.)

Typing fast doesn’t just cause typos, the University of Waterloo found. It also allows students to write before they formulate their ideas fully.

In other words, fast typing undermines the content of their writing.

The study comes from a team under Prof. Evan Risko, who holds a Canada Research Chair in embodied and embedded cognition.

His team asked students to write essay-style answers to questions — typing some answers normally, and others using only one hand.

Using one hand slowed them to about the speed of handwriting, the study found. It also made their answers much better.

“Typing can be too fluent or too fast, and can actually impair the writing process,” said Srdan Medimorec, a PhD candidate at Waterloo and main author of the study.