While typists should be encouraged to avoid mistakes at all costs, they should also be encouraged and not discouraged from fixing mistakes as they are typing. An additional time penalty on top of the inherent time penalty discourages the typist from correcting their mistakes in the first place. This means that the time penalty is already built into the process of correcting a mistake. The first impulse is to count all errors regardless of correction, however there are two strong arguments as to why only the uncorrected errors should be penalized:ġ) Fixing mistakes not only messes up the typist’s rhythm and likely causes brief pauses, but function keys like the delete key take time to press and do not count as a keyed entry.
This is a rather simple equation – the hard part is actually deciding which types of errors should be counted.
