I did an experiment last night. I tried to use the Google "Swype" keyboard on my Android phone to "type" into writeordie.com. I thought Swype was pretty fast, but apparently, that's because typing on the old Android "keyboard" is so slow that Swype seems fast in comparison. I had five minutes left of my fifteen and only had 299 words (which was hard to see, because the big text entry box didn't fit on the screen, so you had to actually scroll down to see your running word count, minutes remaining, or the end of the text to re-position your cursor after scrolling (or editing .) I didn't bother doing the remaining five minutes, but just extrapolated. At that rate, I would have done 450 words in fifteen minutes, and my sprints are normally in the 600-750 range.

Bummer. I was hoping Swype would be easier on my chronic tenosynovitis (wrist pain) and more readily available (I always have my phone.) I still may use it, along with Evernote, to write when it's the only convenient device I have, but I worry about typos, too. When I make a typo under normal typing conditions, it's obviously a tyupo. (See what I did there?) But when Android decides that "tyupo" is really thyme and changes my word altogether, it can be difficult later to remember what I meant to say.


Regards,
Michelle