Question: Do you think it's weird that there's a whole category of keyboards marketed to gamers, as well as many aimed at software developers, coders, and other adepts and computer ninjas, but no category of keyboards marketed to writers? Serious question.
Sign o' the times, as Prince once sang.
I'm having a lot of anxiety about this keyboard situation. I've had a number of situations or experiences in my life when my settled habits and hard-won competencies got blown up for some reason, and I went off the rails and never got back on. The idea that I might never get comfortable typing again is probably irrational and untrue. But irrational fears make you fearful just like rational ones do.
Supine with a shotgun
Here's a brief rundown the main problems with typing posture on flat rectangular keyboards, of which the Apple Keyboard or any laptop keyboard are leading examples.
Starting position: stand or sit with your arms down and your elbows by your side. Raise your forearms till they're parallel with the floor and put your hands straight out, palms down.
Wrist extension: First, from that starting position, move your hands at the wrist till your fingers point upwards. Then flatten just your fingers. That's wrist extension. Wrist extension happens when your flat keyboard is above the level of where you're resting the heels of your hands. It also happens when you're angling your forearms up to reach your desktop. This is a perfectly comfortable movement for healthy hands, but if you work your fingers for hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades with your wrists fixed in an extended position, it becomes a recipe for RSI. It's one reason why your hands are supposed to "float" above the keyboard, with the heels of your hands not touching the desk. Of course few people do that. What many keyboards do instead is to provide little fold-out legs on the underside of the keyboard in the back, to angle the keyboard the wrong way! Because it makes the face of the keyboard and the legends on the keys easier to see.
Hand pronation: In starting position again, with your elbows by your sides and your forearm extended parallel to the floor again, rotate your thumbs upward until your palms are again flat, but facing the ceiling. That's called supination, related to supine, which means lying on your back. T.S. Eliot wrote, In "The Fire Sermon":
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.
The poetic image is of a body lying on its back. Palms up, hand supination; palms down, hand pronation (relates the prone, the position of a soldier firing a rifle lying down; but not in the case of Edwin Throckmorton ("Ebby") Thatcher, who was so drunk when he was trying to shoot pigeons off the roof of his family's empty mansion that when he slipped on the thick wet grass and fell down, he found he could not get up again, so he commenced to firing shotgun blasts at the pigeons while lying supine on the grass. The neighbors called the police). Anyway. If you sit at a cleared table and place your elbows on the table and bring you hands together or nearly together on the table in front of you in the most natural and comfortable position, you'll find that your palms are not dead flat but angled upwards somewhat. When you have to keep them flat with your palms down, as you do when typing on a laptop keyboard, the ulnar bone and the radius bone of the forearm twist and pinch, and the problem is called pronation.
Ulnar angling: This is my term; typing folk rather lazily call it "ulnar deviation," which, strictly speaking, is a medical condition, a semi-permanent deformity caused, usually, by rheumatoid arthritis, not just a way of holding your hand or hands. (The more poetic description for the deformity is windblown hand.) From the starting position, still with your palms down and fingers straight, rotate your flat hands outward towards your pinkies until your fingers of each hand are pointing away from the other hand. Then bring them together in the middle. That angling of the wrist is what causes trouble. (If I had another person here a few photos could illustrate these positions in a jiffy, but the only other nearby being is Butters.)
Hunching: When you bring your wrists together in front of you, then look down, it tends to bring your shoulders forward and inward, curve your back forward, and crane your neck downwards. Sit in this posture persistently and it begins to transfer a significant amount of tension to your shoulders, back, and neck. Ever feel like you need a good shoulder and neck rub after you've been typing for a long time?
Fingertip impact: The last of the major RSI problems is fingertip impact. High-speed typists really pound away at the keyboard. Barbara Blackburn, born 1920, was listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the world's fastest typist, with an unofficial speed of 212 WPM on the Dvorak layout. (Keystroking records were removed from the Guinness Book from 1986 onwards.) Evidently it's not feasible to type with a light, delicate, diaphanous touch and still be a speed demon.
Solutions
And here are the ways "ergonomic" keyboards usually try to correct the above problems. The common way to ease ulnar angling is to split the keyboard, almost always along the T-G-B / Y-H-N line. This can either be done by placement on a single, fixed board, like the keyboard I've been using for 30 years, angling each bank of keys inward at the top and outward at the bottom. A custom becoming more common recently is to physically split the keyboard into two independent halves, making it possible to place and angle the keys in relation to your hands in whatever way feels most comfortable. Fascinatingly, I've noticed that some YouTubers, when trying split keyboards for the first time, will angle the halves the wrong way in order to reproduce the undesirable ulnar angling of their wrists that they've long been used to!
Wrist extension can be solved by devising a "wrist rest" for the heels of the hands to rest on that's level with the keys, or by manipulating the relationship of chair, desk, and keyboard until the fingers can rest on the keys with the hands in a relaxed position.
Pronation is solved either by moving the two halves of a physically split keyboard far apart, or by what's called tenting, which means propping up the halves with the inside edge higher than the outside edge, or some combination of these two things. Just keeping the keyboard in one piece prevents adequate tenting, and all the Microsoft-style "ergo" one-piece keyboards offer only a mild bump in the middle for a very low degree of tenting.
A keyboard that is split, has integral wrist-rests, and is tented
Hunching is solved by moving the split halves of a keyboard back toward the body so that the shoulders open up and straighten, the spine can be held straight, and the arms can relax. It takes some getting used to, but it's extraordinary how comfortable it is.
As for fingertip impact, consider what TOP reader John Camp, AKA John Sandford, who has not one but many No. 1 New York Times bestsellers to his credit, said here the other day:
I estimate that I type roughly 400,000 words a year. But the thing is, I'm not trying to type 80 or 60 or 40 words per minute, or any other number, because I frequently pause to think, and reconfigure what I'm about to type, or to rework something I already typed, and I don't know how that would fit into an efficiency calculation. I think I'm efficient enough, and wouldn't get any better with any of the other keyboard styles, but what I really need is something that would keep my fingers and wrists from being damaged by the work.
Human beings love superlatives, and social media reveals a constant striving for extremes. Fastest biggest richest strongest best; idiotic GOAT arguments and "winners"and "losers" separated by hundredths of a second. But in writing (and perhaps even in typing in general) there's no real need to take things to extremes. Nothing much is wanted in most cases past the point of relaxed and accurate competency. Maybe this was not the case when a "draft" of a novel involved retyping the whole thing from start to finish; but now we make corrections, revisions, and emendations inline, thanks to the computer. And words look the same on the page regardless of whether you typed them quickly or slowly. The overall average speed of all typists is believed to be ~40 WPM. Many of the world's greatest authors wrote their works in longhand—some with a sharpened goose feather dipped in ink, and that can't be fast. And one can be a writer typing no faster than Archy the cockroach hopping around on the keys of Don Marquis' mechanical typewriter, the only kind they had in those days. That's probably why there are no keyboards made specifically for writers. (Although wouldn't it be a good marketing strategy?)
However, safety is something else. Apple could be leading the way here, but it chooses instead to contribute to the problem, leaving innovations in RSI prevention to small independent (and typically undercapitalized) companies like the pioneer Kinesis or the next-gen innovator ZSA. As many as 60% of people who type all day for their jobs will suffer RSI at some point in their lives (my right hand hurts right now). It is the number one cause of lost productivity in the white collar workplace, keeping workers out of commission for an average of 23 days per injury. Its more insidious forms, such as the dreaded carpal tunnel syndrome, are frustratingly persistent and slow to heal.
So while moderate typing speed is usually enough, it's still of crucial importance to "keep [your] fingers and wrists from being damaged by the work," in John's words. It's a field in which not much progress has yet been made.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Joshua Rothman: "As a writer myself, I know exactly what you mean. I use the Keychron Q11 split keyboard. I think it has brown switches. I'm nowhere near as far down the rabbit hole as you, but I did have my own little keyboard adventure, and since landing on the Q11 my wrist pain has gone away—even my tennis elbow seems better!"
ASW: "When I was a kid my mom put me in piano lessons. I remember that after 10–15 minutes of playing (very poorly) my wrists and forearms would start to hurt. The hand placement never felt natural to me. I've never had a similar issue with typing (on a basic desktop or laptop keyboard). I think that my perfectionism might play a role. I rarely type more than a few sentences at a time before pausing to reconsider, and usually change or even delete the majority of what I just typed. It makes for horribly inefficient writing progress, but gives me plenty of rest, and so far has prevented any RSI issues despite spending lots of time at the computer most days.
"As far as the key pounding goes, my wife's typing (even through walls and doors) sounds like a high-speed jackhammer in action. I'm a pretty light typer, again because I spend far more time pondering than typing."
Ken James: "Hi Mike, Have not typed you in a long time.
"How high is your desktop? Standard desk height? I over the years have made several desks. I make the top surface be 24 inches give a take a bit. My current desk is 25. In the past I used plywood for the whole thing but for this last one I bought legs on Etsy and put 2x12's on top. I did a bunch of stuff to the timber to make it pretty but you don't have to. This might well solve all or most of the wrist problems. Might. I also find a trackpad to be much better than a mouse. I designed home office systems for 12 years or so, so have thought about this a bit."
Mike replies: I have a sit-stand (adjustable height) desk that's 25" off the floor in its lowest position, and that is indeed what I use with the keyboard in the illustration above—I'm happy to have an expert encourage it! The adjustable height from a standing position is great for experimenting.
Mice and trackballs also force your wrists into an extended position. After some really bad RSI troubles that made my hands and fingers tremble, shake, and hurt, I moved away from mice and went to using a WACOM pen pad. That mostly cured my problem. The pad sits where the mouse pad used to. I've learned to hold the pen in my fingers while I type so I don't have to pick it up and put it down all the time.
I wouldn't be able to use a computer at all by now if I hadn't made the change.
Posted by: Tom Passin | Monday, 26 February 2024 at 01:16 PM
Like playing a musical instrument at a high level, intensive typing is an athletic activity, and anyone who does it should warm up before, cool down and stretch after, and take frequent breaks. I'm sure there are injury-prevention tutorials out there for typing, as there are for musicians. Here's one for gamers: https://youtu.be/degYaAE0Ehs
Aren't writers, editors and typists the default market for keyboards? Kind of like right-handedness?*
Anyway, it's really in software that marketing focuses on those groups, via macros, UIs, etc., and it can get highly specialized, as with screenwriting or transcribing. Much of this is aimed at reducing repetitive tasks and keystrokes, so there we have another kind of ergonomic solution.
When I got RSI I had a job that largely consisted of correcting and laying out camera-ready copy. It initially involved physically moving between dedicated stations, and a wide variety of small and large body movements. But when the office went digital, the job became sitting at one desk all day and mostly using the same couple of fingers and keys over and over to navigate and correct digital text. Eventually, mouse clicking was added. All this on the lowest-cost equipment the company could find.
Then I would go home and play computer games on my own cheap equipment, and do very similar repetitive keying and/or mouse-ing, except at higher intensity.
Which is to say: 1) I don't find it weird that there are keyboards aimed at gamers (especially now that it's a profession);** 2) Computers save us a lot of retyping, while introduce other ways to injure ourselves; and 3) Ergonomic keyboard layouts would not have helped me avoid RSI in the above situation, though it's possible that good key switches--one focus of today's gaming and coding keyboards--might have.
*Though I would not be surprised if there are more professional coders today than professional writers.
**Also, gamers prefer dark rooms, to aid immersion and focus, which is why gaming keyboards and mice are illuminated.
Posted by: robert e | Monday, 26 February 2024 at 01:54 PM
Six degrees of irrelevance..
Throckmorton, as a name, would seem to me to be quite uncommon ( based on absolutely no research by me). Today however, I have been aware of the name twice! Being an unapologetic fan of CNN and Fareed Zakaria's GPS show, I thought to educate myself about his background. Lo and behold his ex-wife's maiden name is - Throckmorton. As Paul Harvey would say "and that's the rest of the story".
Posted by: Les von Pongracz | Monday, 26 February 2024 at 03:13 PM
I read with great interest, until I see a photo of a split, tented, glowing keyboard of great thoughtfulness and price, with an ergonomic nightmare of a mouse in-betwixt. My wrist hurts as much as my brain to view it.
[
Don't knock it till you've tried it! --Mike]
Posted by: MarkB | Monday, 26 February 2024 at 03:44 PM
Time to investigate speech to text or better yet thought to text.
Guessing you’re not ready for Neuralink.
Posted by: JimF | Monday, 26 February 2024 at 04:19 PM
Related to Ken James's comment about mice, I have never been able to use a scrollwheel mouse. Within 5 minutes of using the wheel, my wrists are on fire.
But I hate trackpads (and trackballs, remember those?). What I find most amazing -- and have been using for nearly 20 years -- is "Middle Mouse Button Scroll". With a classic three-button mouse, holding the middle button down allows movement of the mouse to move the document on the screen. It's like using the spacebar in Photoshop to drag the photo around, but it works in every application.
Easy on the hands? Check. Wide range of movement? Check. Fine-grained control? Check.
For years, I have hoarded my old three-button mice, using PS/2-to-USB adapters to connect them, and cleaning the ball from time to time (some of you won't even know what half this sentence means). Recently I found a decent wireless (RF) three-button laser mouse. I bought two.
Middle Mouse Button scrolling can be configured on Linux or Windows machines in the settings. On my MacBook, I had to install an extension (https://marcmoini.com/sx_en.html, they call the feature "Grab Scroll").
Posted by: Joel Becker | Tuesday, 27 February 2024 at 12:50 AM
Very possible to type fast with a light, diaphanous touch - but is absolutely guaranteed to cause RSI. An important reason that pianists are taught to hold their hands with wrists up and play with finger tips is to avoid RSI by engaging the whole forearm muscle strength. RSI is, of course, an absolute nightmare for any professional pianist -potentially career ending. A firm touch using the whole of the finger strength also helps prevent RSI - hence the high-speed bangers on the typewriters who don't care about the noise - not so good for a sustained presto yet pianissimo passage...
Posted by: Bear. | Tuesday, 27 February 2024 at 01:26 AM