An interesting set of articles that address a well-known and widely-accepted meme. You've probably heard that the Dvorak keyboard is more efficient than the traditional QWERTY laoyout. But the study that purportedly proved that it would be more efficient to retrain workers to learn Dvorak's alternate keyboard was supervised by Dvorak himself. Does that matter?

The QWERTY Myth: (The Economist) "...goes roughly as follows. The QWERTY design (patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873) aimed to solve a mechanical problem of early typewriters. When certain combinations of keys were struck quickly, the type bars often jammed." But the real problem is that "economists seem to adopt bogus anecdotal histories and then get locked in."

• A drier, more academic version: "The Fable of the Keys."



• A rebuttal, from The Dvorak Keyboard: "[P]ro-QWERTY articles are
  
  written by people that don't care about typing efficiency, but
  
  rather want to make an academic point by shooting down the
  
  Dvorak keyboard."

(A side note... a good assignment for upper-level writing students might involve comparing the snappy little article from The Economist and the dry academic chapter which it summarizes; both are online.) --DGJ