Why Touchtype?

In the past, learning to type quickly was mostly for secretaries, who were copytyping, or taking dictation. People with lots of text to write would draft it by hand and then type it, or have it typed. Typing involved hammering away with long passages of text, without thinking at the same time, often with a manual typewriter. These days, Optical Character Recognition packages and Speech Recognition packages have made this practice obselete, not to mention the fact that bosses are learning to type!

Touch typing is still useful!

While secretarial typing is a dying art, typing in general is becoming more common. People type emails to each other, and are learning that Word Processors allow you to edit as you go. With a computer, you don't need to start writing at the beginning, and finish at the end - you can do it in any order you like. But in order to be able to do this efficiently, you must not be interrupted by your typing speed - you should be able to type as fast as you write, and above all, you must not have to keep interrupting your thought process in order to correcting typing errors. You must type Accurately - you won't be able to keep up with your thoughts if you have to keep checking and correcting typos. The Philosophy of SESType reflects this difference.