The method could benefit people using computers, pen-and-paper or even speech-to-text.
Forcing yourself to slow your typing pace could improve the quality of your writing.
Participants in the study who typed with only one hand produced higher quality essays, researchers found.
Dr Srdan Medimorec, the study’s lead author, said:
“Typing can be too fluent or too fast, and can actually impair the writing process.
It seems that what we write is a product of the interactions between our thoughts and the tools we use to express them.”
People who type quickly may settle for the first word that comes to mind.
Slowing down allows the mind more time to find the right word.
This could be why forcing yourself to slow down a little improves the sophistication of the vocabulary used.
Professor Evan F. Risko, who co-authored the study, said:
“This is the first study to show that when you interfere with people’s typing, their writing can get better.
We’re not saying that students should write their term papers with one hand, but our results show that going fast can have its drawbacks.
This is important to consider as writing tools continue to emerge that let us get our thoughts onto the proverbial page faster and faster.”
Slowing down your writing could improve quality regardless of the input method used, the authors say.
The same trick could benefit people using pen-and-paper or even speech-to-text.
Slowing down too much, though, can be detrimental.
Previous research suggests that when people write more slowly than their normal handwriting speed, the quality declines.
Related
The study was published in the British Journal of Psychology (Medimorec & Risko, 2016).
