Reflecting on this, I had another thought of something I could do as a resolution for the year 2026. It occurred to me while playing a typing game called Glyphica. In the game, you occupy a central turret and fire at invaders coming at you from all sides. You select your target by typing the word that appears above them. The game is a lot of fun; reminds me of the quality time I spent with Typing of the Dead on Dreamcast, an edutainment title that doubled my typing speed in the course of a few weeks. Though the games are very different in terms of presentation, the biggest difference is one of quality of life. In the decades between the two titles, we’ve gone from spellcheck being a luxury to the software going the extra step of not only correcting your errors without you asking, but even predicting what it is you’re trying to say in the first place. If I start typing a word like constitution, I only need to get about as far as “const” before the autocomplete shows me the rest of the word, at which point I need only press the tab key to finish what I started and move on to the next word. A hundred keystrokes can drop down to as low as sixty-five in this way. So, what, you may ask, is the problem?
Between Glphyica and an online typing speed test called Monkeytype, it's occurred to me that I've amassed a sizable number of bad typing habits because autocorrect swoops in and fixes them, sometimes before I even notice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s convenient when it’s not trying to forcefully make me say an incorrect word, but I feel like this is offloading vital aspects of a skill I happen to be very proud of. Between that and autocomplete, the software is doing too much heavy lifting for my liking.
My worst habit is something I like to call chording. It happens with especially short words such as "the", "to", and... well, "and." The problem is I hit all the keys at once and I end up with "teh", "ot", and "adn." I can't help but wonder if stenographers have this problem outside of the courtroom. Although chording has technically been with me since I first learned to type, autocorrect and autocomplete have made it substantially worse. Rather than typewriter keys jamming or the timing of my keystrokes being measured in imperceptible milliseconds, the software is able to work out that I'm writing "the" and not "teh" as "teh" isn't a word as far as I know, at least not one in English.
If you've ever seen that brain teaser where the words in a paragraph all have their respective letters out of order (yet it's still readable because your brain unscrambles it from context clues), that's more or less what my typing feels like to me at this point. It's like I know words as clusters of letters rather than sequences of them. My muscle memory has contracted to the point where it's folded in on itself. My speed has been relatively consistent, but my accuracy has taken a massive hit, and that's no good to anybody ecepxt vrey wreid poelpe who lkie tshoe arfoneemtoiend barin tseaers.
This has led me to the decision to disable autocorrect and autocomplete on my Mac. Spellcheck gets to stay, inadvertent brain teaser construction be damned. A red line appearing under a word I just typed doesn't bother me. That's instant feedback on a mistake I made and it's on me to fix it. It's gently saving me time, not doing the work for me. It's what The Oatmeal would call an administrative task and not a creative one. When I give what I've written a once-over, it's highlighted the areas that need my attention first. It's working ex post facto rather than trying to get ahead of me like far too many "smart features." Those assume what you're going to do next. Sometimes they're right, but other times I want to write construction or constriction or consternation or even constituent rather than constitution.
As for my iPhone, predictive text (which is essentially autocomplete) remains enabled on my keyboard of choice, Microslop's SwiftKey, the only Microslop product I use willingly and with any consistency. The reason for keeping this feature enabled is simple. It's a small and cramped keyboard and I need all the help I can get. It's like Lewis Carroll's Nyctograph, a specific tool for a specific job. In his case, it was writing in the dark and without getting out of bed. In my case, it's when I need to write something and either can't get to one of my full-sized mechanical keyboards when I want to or, like Mr. Carroll, I can't be bothered to get out of bed or off the couch at the moment.
The jury had been out on the iPad since it's a notable difference in screen real estate, but I don't always have one of my Bluetooth keyboards along with me and the on-screen keyboard still has all the same problems as the iPhone.
As for the paper resolution, that has stuck around as far as taking notes at work goes, though Post-It notes will no longer give me pangs of guilt on the rare occasions I have to use them. For everything else, I do want to start doing more traditional art instead of my usual vector works. I'm even going to try using a fountain pen after either losing or breaking the first one I tried. I don't remember which fate befell it, which is why I'm happy to have discovered that disposable fountain pens exist. In fact, some artists recommend them over their more expensive brethren.
