Blindtyping

Editing while writing is an counterproductive habit people get into, where instead of cranking out a draft, they keep looking back at the words they've just written and try to make them just a bit better. While that does result in a nicer first draft, the constant context-switching between editing and writing takes significant time away from the process, and is usually slower than speeding through a draft first then editing it on a second pass.

There are multiple tricks one can use to avoid editing while drafting. A few I've heard of include:

• Typing with white text on white background so you don't see the words you are writing.
• Using a website such as The Most Dangerous Writing App, which deletes your draft if you stop typing for long enough.
• Relying on sheer force of will to force oneself to type ahead and leave mistakes be in the first draft. (Probably works for some; not me.)

My own technique for writing without editing developed around the time I started to touch type. When touch-typing, I don't need to look at the text nor the keyboard; and as such, I can keep my eyes closed while I type. As an experiment, I decided to type with a scarf over my eyes as a blindfold. This was quite fun, and later, I realized I don't even need the whole blindfold—I just need to make sure I can't see what I'm typing. So these days, I just push the text editor off-screen and keep typing into the void—then, when I'm finished, I pull it back out and edit the text.

I call that technique blindtyping.

Pros and cons

Blindtyping is a bit different from regular writing. While usually you can always go up and see what you've written before, when writing blindfolded, you can only use what you can hold in your mind. For me, that's about a sentence of text plus a general idea of topics I've covered so far.

Even though I don't remember as much, I find that the resulting prose typically flows a lot better. I'm guessing that's because I'm following my train of thought as it goes, instead of going back and forth, trying to weave a coherent piece of text out of a jumbled mess of thoughts.

At the same time, blindtyping often leaves a lot of typos in the text, and those typos can require a lot of cleaning up afterwards. Usually, it's just swapped letters because of bad muscle memory, but a few times, I've had to fix whole paragraphs where I shifted one of my hands off by a row or column on the keyboard. Plus, certain syntactic constructs, like quotes or parentheses, are hard to use while blindfolded.

In a sense, blindfold typing is somewhat similar to how text generation through Large Language Models operates—you type in the words one at a time, never going back to edit them. As a human, you have the advantage of putting actual experience into what you write, and not just a grand average of all articles you've seen before. In addition, you have the advantage of being able to keep a more structured thought process in your mind, without having to reread the whole output so far to figure out where you were. A machine, however, has the advantage of having perfect focus and a much clearer output, with no typos, no edit comments, and no misplaced words.

In the end, though, content trumps form. And if you can't ever coax an article into a blank sheet of paper because you keep getting stuck on fixing mistakes, perhaps it's time you stop staring at the blank piece of paper, and just write (type) without looking, leaving the form for later time.

Tips and tricks

From my time editing text files and blind-typing, I've picked up a few tip and tricks, which you might find useful even if you are not into blindtyping:

• You can hold down Ctrl and use the arrow keys to move by whole words. This lets you go back into a sentence you've just blindtyped to add an extra word or two, without having to count the letters of words.
• In addition, by holding down both Ctrl and Shift and using the arrow keys, you can select the previous/next word. I usually use that to select and replace whole words and phrases, though some people prefer using Ctrl-Backspace and Ctrl-Delete instead.
• And, still in the realm of keyboard shortcuts, the Home and End keys are your friends; they let you navigate back to the start or end of the current line, respectively. Ctrl-End is even more helpful, as it sends you directly to the end of the text, in case you find yourself somewhere in the middle of a sentence.
• Periodically save your work and make sure you are still typing into the right window. I've lost whole stories by typing into the desktop while blindfolded—don't be next.
• Establish some convention to mark off parts of the text that need fixing, or fixes suggested for previous text. Initially, I used to use [] to mark text that needs to be fixed, but recently, I'm starting to use other characters too—for example, this post made use of *- as a kind of brackets around comments. That way, you have a way to leave yourself a note for later, rather than having to count words mentally in order to edit while blindfolded.
• Be prepared to edit a lot once you are no longer blindfolded. Blindtyping rarely leaves pretty text; as mentioned before, chances are you would need to edit most of it for it to be ready for presenting.

A curious thing about blindtyping is that it tends to make me sleepy. So, if you are going to try blindtyping, I would recommend you do so at a time of the day when you can afford to be sleepy.

Additionally, blindtyping is terrible at dealing with distractions. Anything that might cause you to lose your train of thought is something that can derail the text you are drafting with no way to come back to the same thought you had before.

The combination of those last two makes blindtyping almost like a kind of seance or meditation—you focus on the story you are trying to tell, in monotone silence, interrupted only by keys tapping on a keyboard, and by necessity zone everything else out, for you need all the focus you can get to keep the prose flowing nicely. And once you decide you've had enough for a session and stop, it feels like you've just woken up!

And I honestly enjoy that! The best part for me is that I get to spare my eyes a bit of screen fatigue. Compared to all the other looking at computer screens I do over the course of the day, the few minutes I might save by blindtyping aren't much, but it's a bit of rest that would otherwise push me off a computer. So for busy or writing-heavy days, it makes a lot of sense.

Conclusion

As you might guess, this whole blog post was blindtyped. I did that in KWrite, a minimal version of KDE's Kate editor (my usual text editor) that doesn't support for opening whole projects or directories and such. I initially tried to make the text inside KWrite invisible with an all-black color scheme, but sadly this still left blinking white text cursor / caret in the middle of the page, which I would find distracting. So, for this post at least, I went back to my earlier technique and pushed KWrite off the lower screen's edge while typing.

However, what you've just read has also been edited. If you want to see the original draft, before I got to edit and combine the two blindtyping sessions that made up this post, you can check it out here.

I haven't used blindtyping for any other blog posts so far, but it takes a less time to complete an article with blindtyping that with my usual approach. If you like the result in terms of content and flow, especially as compared to my other posts, you should consider trying it out yourself! 😊

This post was partially inspired by Joel's recent post touching on his own blogging techniques, which you might enjoy too!

Also, this was my 16th post of #100DaysToOffload. Hopefully I can use this technique to write some of the remaining 84 posts! ✨