A recent Wall Street Journal report delves into Gen Z's surprising lack of keyboard typing skills, featuring interviews with several individuals and revealing some startling statistics.
As others highlighted this is not surprising given that Gen Z uses phones a lot more than computers, and writing in one is completely different than in the other.
[Discussion from multiple comments ITT] It’s also damn slower to write in a phone screen, simply because it’s smaller - you need a bit more precision to hit the keys, and there’s no room to use all the fingers (unlike in a physical keyboard).
Swiping helps, but it brings up its own problems - the keyboard application needs to “guess” what you’re typing, and correcting mistakes consumes time; you need to look at the word being “guessed” instead of either the keyboard or the text being written, so your accuracy goes down (increasing the odds of wrong “guesses”); and eventually you need to tap write a few words anyway, so you’re basically required to type well two ways instead of just one to get any semblance of speed.
As others highlighted this is not surprising given that Gen Z uses phones a lot more than computers, and writing in one is completely different than in the other.
[Discussion from multiple comments ITT] It’s also damn slower to write in a phone screen, simply because it’s smaller - you need a bit more precision to hit the keys, and there’s no room to use all the fingers (unlike in a physical keyboard).
Swiping helps, but it brings up its own problems - the keyboard application needs to “guess” what you’re typing, and correcting mistakes consumes time; you need to look at the word being “guessed” instead of either the keyboard or the text being written, so your accuracy goes down (increasing the odds of wrong “guesses”); and eventually you need to tap write a few words anyway, so you’re basically required to type well two ways instead of just one to get any semblance of speed.