If you want to be a good writer, type slow

Washington D.C: You may want to slow down your typing in order to improve your writing as a new study suggests so.

The quality of your writing will likely get better if you simply type slower, according to the researchers from the University of Waterloo, who asked study participants to type essays using both hands or with only one.

Using text-analysis software, the team discovered that some aspects of essay writing, such as sophistication of vocabulary, improved when participants used only one hand to type.

Typing can be too fluent or too fast and can actually impair the writing process, said lead author Srdan Medimorec, adding that it seems that what we write is a product of the interactions between our thoughts and the tools we use to express them.

The results led the researchers to speculate that slowing down participants' typing by asking them to use only one hand, allowed more time for internal word search, resulting in a larger variety of words. Fast typists may have simply written the first word that came to mind.

The researchers suggest that speed could affect writing quality regardless of the tools, whether they are text-to-speech programs, computers or a pen and paper, but future research is required to confirm this idea. In addition, the researchers note in the paper that previous research has demonstrated that slowing down typing too much could impair writing. Their one-handed typing condition only slowed writing to about the speed of handwriting. Hence, the hunt-and-peck method might not be the solution.

The paper appears in the British Journal of Psychology.