Typing A Personality

A few hours spent with August Dvorak's (and co-authors') Typewriting Behavior; Psychology Applied to Teaching and Learning Typewriting (1936), go a long way...in explaining the curious hold that QWERTYnomics has had on some these past three decades.

According to Dvorak, the key to improved typing is an improved personality:

In this first typewriting crisis, what personality will you assume?.... Will you take the successful way of the superior typing student? Or is it to be the troubled path of the inferior typing student, who must comprise his failure with alibis or day dreams, or the casting of blame, or 'sour grapes'.

and,

...a bulk of [typing] errors is a personal matter.  It results from underlying personal troubles.... Sometimes the errors may be part of a young typist's queer attempts to overcome personal trouble.

and,

Learning to type successfully is intelligent behavior in more ways than many mediocre typists appear yet to realize. 

Somewhat ironic, that above casting of blame, or 'sour grapes', in light of the subsequent tilting at keyboards by Dvorak.  That ended in complete frustration for the former University of Washington time and motion expert.  As Jared Diamond put it in The Curse of QWERTY; August Dvorak died in 1975, a bitter man: I’m tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race, he complained. They simply don’t want to change!

They didn't change, because there was no reason to change, contrary to the fevered rantings of Dvorak and his acolytes.  Psychology, yeah, yeah, that's the ticket.