Text Entry Advice

Here are some tips to for using Graffiti® (Palm) or Letter Recognizer® (Windows Mobile) text entry:

• Make your letter strokes as large as possible.
• Don't go too quickly or too slowly.
• Hold your stylus like you would a pen or pencil.
• Avoid pushing too hard – you don't need to carve your letters into the handheld.
• Use the Giraffe game to practice and improve your Graffiti.
• Don't make your characters slanted.
• On a Palm handheld, set shortcuts for words or expressions you use often. Set the shortcuts in the Prefs application.
• Go through the Graffiti 2 tutorial located in the Quick Tour application on your Palm handheld.
• If you don't know a stroke or have trouble with a character, simply switch to the onscreen keyboard, tap the character you want, and then switch back to using Graffiti or Letter Recognizer.
• Keep your eyes on the text entry area and focus on your stroke, not what is appearing on the screen.
• Don't wait for the handheld to display the character you just made. Move on to making your next character. If there are mistakes, go back and fix them after you've entered your line of text.

The last two tips come from Ed Hardy, Editor-in-Chief at Brighthand.com. Read his editorial How to Speed Up Your Text Entry in One Easy Lesson. For more tips, watch videos #4 and #5 from Palm and Atomic Learning. Palm has some Graffiti 2 tips. Finally, apcmag.com's Screenwriting Secrets reveals many ways to increase your speed and accuracy.

Comments

[Dale Ehrhart]

Hello all, I love reading this blog.

You can also use Spell-It for grafitti practice. Just check the "Use Graffiti for Entry Box?" check box and create a quiz using the graffiti alphabet and symbols.
Great for immediate feedback and for customizing quizes with the letters and symbols that give you problems.

On another note I found a freeware calculator at Palmgear called Averages that, as it name say says, calculates averages of up to 16 numbers. It may come in handy for some people.

[Tony Vincent]

Thanks Dale! I never thought of using SpellIT for Graffiti practice. What a great idea!