Your point on handwriting being slow...
I agree very much with you annd Keith on the fact that all these alternative methods are far faster than handwriting. I had the same reaction to a bold claim made on the Pocket PC Thought forum: ... I was just playing around and decided to use transcriber in word, and well the 70 word a minute guys are not that hard to beat ... My response was that I have real doubts that this is achievable with any handwriting method. I tried a test with pencil and paper and anyone can try it easily. I tried to write the text as fast as I could -- without trying to be readable, without even bothering to cross the t's and dot the i's -- and the resulting scribble was not recognizable by anybody and even less by any software... The best I was able to achieve was 51 seconds, which is about 48wpm. Of course, there may be ultra fast writers doing better — like Keith's 44 seconds. In any case, the pencil and paper scribbling speed is a natural upper bound on what any handwriting method will ever be able to achieve. In the Dom Perignon II contest, the best score ever reported with a handwriting method was with Graffiti at 49.44wpm and everybody regarded it very much like a Bob Beamon Mexico long jump record because it was so much better than the average fast Graffiti user. After all, this should be no surprise: One of the motivations for the invention of the typewriter, more than a century ago, was precisely to overcome the slow speed of handwriting. Jean Ichbiah
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