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Mavis Beacon teaches typing on the ST

by Geoffrey Hart

Previously published as: Hart, G.J. 1990. Mavis Beacon teaches typing on the ST. Computer Shopper, September:660, 662.

As a writer, one of the greatest obstacles to the creative process is trying to get the words down on paper or on disk as fast as they flow from the mind. The typewriter enables us to spread the burden of writing from the three fingers used to hold a pen to the 10 fingers used to type.

For those of us unable to touch-type, there was always “hunt-and-pecking” with two or more fingers. This always induced a fair bit of scorn among those who could touch-type, but at my peak, I was able to hit over 50 words per minute (wpm) with two fingers at an error rate of 5 percent. Not bad.

When I encountered the productivity of the word processor, my inability to use more than four fingers soon became the limit to productivity. The solution was obvious: I bought a typing tutor program.

Having read good reviews about someone called Mavis Beacon, I selected Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (MB) for the Atari ST from Software Toolworks. No indication is given as to who Mavis Beacon is, if indeed she ever existed outside of the feverish imagination of the program’s designers. [Ed. note: She is a fictional character.] But Mavis is certainly a good teacher.

The aim of MB is simple and blunt: to get you typing with all 10 fingers so fluently that after a short time, you won’t even be thinking about what your fingers are doing. This may seem to be an unattainable goal at first, but you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how attainable it really is... with a little self-discipline and a lot of work.

One of the most-unusual things about MB is that the instructions for the program itself are much smaller than the background material that comes with the program. The main manual for MB is 62 pages long, of which only three and a half pages refer to the program itself; the rest of the manual is filled with a history of typing, descriptions of typing and keyboarding basics, sample business letters and resumes to show you how a real typist works, an extensive bibliography, and a few other bits and pieces of trivia.

All of this is exceptionally well written and, contrary to what you might expect, interesting to read. The skimpy documentation on MB itself is no hindrance, as the program can be run entirely from its menus; every time the program begins a new lesson, full onscreen explanations are given. There’s even online help available during a lesson.

The metaphor that’s put forth by MB is a classroom, complete with blackboard and teacher’s desk. There’s no teacher present, other than a disembodied “voice” that writes the lessons on the blackboard or selects the lessons for you.

Once the main typing lessons are begun, you are shown a screen with a typing windows that displays the words you are to type and the letters you actually typed, a keyboard with all letters displayed, and a pair of ghostly hands that mimics your own finger movements as you strike the keys. The idea behind this layout is to teach you to type with your eyes on the screen rather than on the keyboard; when you get good enough, you can turn off display of letters on the onscreen keyboard so that they are no longer available as memory aids. Eventually, you will be able to look down at text in, say, the program’s manual, and type this without looking at the screen at all.

I found this metaphor to be a very effective learning tool. I could watch my mistakes as they appeared on screen, I could consult the keyboard layout when I couldn’t remember which finger went with which key, and in no time at all (half a dozen lessons), I had the majority of the important keys memorized. MB uses a sizeable text database for the lessons (including some relatively purple prose contributed by the program’s authors) and extensive references to the Guinness Book of World Records. This way, you’re not likely to become too bored typing “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog” and other typing standbys. If you begin to get tired of straight text, MB switches gears and pops up a classic arcade-style game in which you participate in a road race, the speed of your car being determined by your typing speed and error rate. The graphics in this game are mediocre at best, but then again, that’s not why you’re playing it.

What sets MB apart is that it uses artificial intelligence and a database of your progress to monitor lessons. Multiple students can use the same program with different records kept for each; MB then uses this data to handle the bookkeeping to distinguish among the types of lessons best suited for each student. If you seem to be making a particular mistake, often mistyping a “w” in place of a “q”, for example, the program can recognize this and will adjust the lessons to favor words with lots of q’s and w’s in them to help you learn the difference in fingering. There are 19 specific categories of errors that MB recognizes, ranging from mistaken fingering to “mirror-image” errors (in which, for instance, you use the index finger of your right hand when you should have used that finger of your left hand). Lessons can be concocted to give you practice at overcoming each of these types of error.

MB also seems to have an uncanny knack for guessing when you’re bored with a particular type of lesson, and will switch periodically to give you a change of pace. For example, after working with precision drills, in which the emphasis is on typing accuracy, MB will switch to a speed drill, in which accuracy is less important than speed. The words and text chosen for these drills vary, and include Latin phrases, letters, and a batch of words you may never have seen before but that really do exist. (I looked them up!) If you’ve been having difficulty with certain letters or combinations of letters, these will crop up frequently in each new lesson until you begin to master them. The nicest thing about MB is that the program never lets you feel that you’ve come as far as possible. The rate of increase in difficulty is such that you’re continually being stretched a little bit.

MB always explains what mistakes you’ve been making, suggests a type of lesson to practice and correct the mistakes, and offers you the option of refusing and choosing another kind of lesson. (You have several options that can be set to alter how “chatty” the program is, how detailed the help is, and so on. Mavis is, by and large, pretty pleasant to “listen to” under the default settings, which I left on, but if you don’t like to treat a computer as something animate, you can dispense with much of the chat.)

I found that the program, like any good tutor, has a mind of its own and tends to suggests lessons that you might not pick on your own; in my case, I still haven’t learned the number and symbol keys properly, and MB keeps trying to con me into trying lessons with lots of numbers and symbols. It occasionally takes persistence to persuade my silicon tutor into letting me wimp out and have my own way, and I often endure the punishment the program doles out. The easiest way to shirk one’s duties is to select the option of “free typing”, in which Mavis goes away and lets you hack away at whatever text flows into your mind.

In addition to allowing a considerable choice of text materials and lessons, there is extensive ability to customize the program. For example, you can toggle between typewriter (carriage returns at end of line) and keyboard (automatic word wrap) modes, and between the standard and Dvorak keyboards.

The various “learning aids” can also be customized, so the speed of the opposing race car in the speed drills more closely reflects your current abilities (the speed is set faster than your current speed to encourage you to try typing faster), and the metronome (a device with a pendulum that clicks back and forth at a pace equivalent to the desired typing speed in a given drill) can be turned on or off. One thing that cannot be customized is the color of text in the road race drills; this text appears as white clouds on a blue sky, seen through the windscreen of your car, and this is often difficult to read. The choice of text styles (color, font, and size) is not provided, a feature that detracts from the speed drill and adds significantly to one’s error rate.

Generally, the typing drills are useful. One problem was with the manner in which errors were displayed on the screen. The text to type is displayed double-spaced in yellow text in the typing window, and the text you type appears below this, with errors appearing in red. When the software is set to display two spaces between a period and the beginning of the next sentence, it is easy to forget to type the second space and subsequently letters are all off by one; similarly, unless you customize the key repeat rate from the desktop before booting MB, you will get a lot of “repeated keystroke” errors. This sort of thing artificially inflates your error rate, and decreases your typing speed if you try to go back to correct the errors.

The problem becomes an issue because MB tries to teach grouping skills. By “grouping”, you attempt to type whole words rather than looking ahead one letter at a time. This strategy can greatly increase typing speed. When you make an error inside a word, each subsequent letter may be in error, too, since it is staggered from its correct position. Once an error is made, you tend to correct it to get your accuracy score back up, and this breaks concentration on typing whole words. It would be nice to have a slightly more “intelligent” algorithm that calculated errors based on whole words rather than individual letters. I have used the word “intelligent” here not to imply any stupidity on the part of the designers, but rather to emphasize that MB does its work through artificial intelligence techniques; in this particular case, the technique probably needs some refinement.

MB relentlessly tracks your progress and provides a broad variety of report formats, ranging from typing speed as a function of time to a breakdown of the keys you’re having trouble with. There are more reports than most students will ever likely use, but Mavis is a discreet teacher and will only reveal what you ask her to. If you desire, report cards can be printed from any of the report formats. As for me, I left my reports safely on disk where no one else is ever likely to see them. Much nicer than having to exhibit your badge of shame for all to see. After all, this is why I bought an electronic tutor instead of attending group classes.

I’ve now managed to bring myself up to over 50 wpm when typing my own text and almost 40 wpm typing Mavis’ lessons—far short of the 150 wpm that one of my friends hits, but a satisfying achievement nonetheless. Until someone develops a verbal interface or, better yet, a hardware connection between me and the computer, I’m satisfied with my progress.

[A look back: Since this article was written, I’ve managed to up my rate to 80+ wpm on a good day. MB is still, 33 years after I wrote this article, being maintained in both Mac and Windows versions. Perhaps it’s time to review it again?—GH]

©2004–2024 Geoffrey Hart. All rights reserved.