Is there a word for a handwriting/typing equivalent to stuttering?

[Silent3]

Someone started a thread about teaching cursive in schools, and it made me think about a problem I've had for a long time.

I can't write very many words one after the other, using printing, or worse, in cursive, before I screw up and need to erase (if in pencil) or cross out part of what I've written.

My typing would be atrocious too if computers didn't make it so easy to correct typos. During the brief span of my life when typewriters were still a thing, I needed white-out a lot.

When I tried to google for a word to describe this, all I found was things about how to represent spoken stuttering in print, and a condition called "dysgraphia", which certainly doesn't apply here, because that's related to difficulty in the comprehension of written language and ability to express oneself in writing.

My problem is purely one related to the physical act of forming words with my fingers without making a lot of little mistakes.

[Ms. Toad]

1. Interesting quesiton.

I make a lot of typing mistakes if I'm trying to record a conversation in real time - but very few if I'm working at my own pace. (I learned to touch type in 7th grade. I'm not generally secretary/administrative assistant fast - but I could out-type at least one of the administrative assistants at my old law firm.)

But there are two places I regularly make mistakes:

My (dominant) right hand types slightly faster, so "th" often comes out "ht." (This also applies when I am typing g with h (both letters first finger - opposite hands).

The second is more intermittent - at times it happens a lot, other times very rarely: I skip entire words. They are in my mind, but when I go back and read what I've just typed the words which should have been in the sentence are completely missing, without any contemporaneous awareness that I didn't actually type them.

[Silent3]

2. Even though I fully understand the difference between "their" and "there"...

..."you're" and "your", etc., and when "its" needs an apostrophe or not, I still type the wrong thing far too often.

[Ms. Toad]

3. Hmm. I don't make those mistakes

unless I'm swipe-typing and don't catch the AI's insistence that I always mean to, when what I really mean is too. But the missing words mystify me.

I think they started when I was on gabapentin for vertigo. The vertigo scrambled my brain. The gabapentin swapped vertigo for dizziness. But it has popped up since then. I still have remnants of vertigo - enough to make curtsying on stage problematic - but not enough to scramble my brain anymore. So I'm not sure what the cause is (or the name, for that matter).

[ProfessorGAC]

14. Related Story

I think you'll enjoy it.
Before I was born, and after my sister got to 10 y/o (I'm 11 years older), my mom was an executive secretary & later a testimony transcriptionist. She did the latter until literally the day she died. She was typing 135 words a minute on a manual typewriter.
Because of that, I knew how to touch type before I knew cursive.
So, comes sophomore year of HS, everyone takes a typing class, semester one. (Private academy)
First day, I sit down and open the typing book (binding at top like a steno book). I put paper in the platen and started typing.
Not seeing him, the instructor comes in, and thinking I'm just clicking gibberish and messing around, he yanks the paper out of the machine & glares at me.
Then he turns the paper and starts to read it. He turns the book and compares it to what I typed.
He says "For this class, just go to the gym and shoot hoops."
Got an A, and never attended class!

[Ms. Toad]

15. I didn't get out of class,

But for some reason I taught myself typing on my father's college typewriter the summer before the class started.

The administrative assistant is interesting. My bosses wanted a record of a phone conversation, but didn't want a recording for some odd-ball reason. (They had a number of odd quirks - including refusing to sponsor a 401K opportunity because they wanted to keep their money under a mattress. Actually in a very low interest savings account.) At any rate, I told them I was perfectly capable of creating a transcript of the conversation. They insisted on having one of our administrative assistants transcribe it. She kept having to stop the conversation so she could keep up. On the other hand, I had time to not only do a rough transcript, but run spellcheck to catch most of the stupid typos. (They also tried to get me to dictate my documents and have the administrative assistants type them up, on the theory that it would save time. They gave up when it came close to doubling my billable hours.)

[ProfessorGAC]

17. I Wasn't Blazing

But I was hitting 75-80wpm with zero or one mistake.
The C in that class was 25wpm adjusted for errors.
It truly would have been pointless for me to be in there. Thankfully, the teacher saw that.
My free throw percentage went up 7 points that semester!

[hlthe2b]

4. Though you aren't implying reading issues, I still have to wonder how dyslexics are affected...

I should think they have their own related difficulties with handwriting and typing.

[1WorldHope]

5. Whatever it is, I've got it too!

I have quit using a pen. I don't think that I have ever written out the perfect greeting card, birthday, sympathy... I always screw up, try to fix it, make it worse, then scratch it out. It is very frustrating. Even using a pencil you can tell that I had to erase something. Sometimes I make it all the way to my signature and then screw that up? 😣

[Silent3]

11. I feel for you! n/t

[Donkees]

6. Possibly ''Brain Fog" ...

On a chemical level, brain fog happens when the stress hormone, cortisol, impairs the prefrontal cortex—the region of the brain that controls most of our cognitive functions like decision-making and concentration. (Basically, your body's flight-or-flight response doesn’t want you to analyze a stressful situation when you’re in danger—it just wants you to run.) Both acute and long-lasting instances of stress keep the prefrontal cortex from doing its job properly—and your brain might feel unclear as a result.

Long story, short: Anxiety takes a lot of mental juice ...

https://www.wellandgood.com/why-does-my-brain-feel-foggy/

[Silent3]

8. Writing has been like that for me all of my life, and it's just a lack of coordination/control when writing n/t

[Donkees]

10. I remember having to do various drawing exercises before learning cursive

those were to strengthen coordination. Here is a similar idea doing hand/arm warm-up exercises to help with strength and dexterity in case you are interested:

https://teachhandwriting.co.uk/handwriting-warm-up-exercises.html

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Probably not it ... but just to check ... do you write right-handed ?

Is there any possibility that you are naturally left-handed, and were forced to "comply" with a right-handed world? That can lead to a lot of problems.

Not likely, I know, but worth asking.

[Silent3]

9. Not forced, but I did break my arm in a bicyle accident just around the time...

...I was learning to write, and my mother told me I often favored my left hand before that.

[egduj]

12. I believe dysgraphia can also involve the act of writing and is not limited to just the comprehension.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23294-dysgraphia

[Cartoonist]

13. Scribbles

[betsuni]

16. Me too, dread having to write anything by hand. May as well give a pen to an animal.

I took typing classes in school but never improved, always lots of mistakes and slow. Now I can't write a sentence without changing it a dozen times, then post and edit some more until it's too embarrassing. I wish I could simply write something once and be done with it. I like to think of this from Umberto Eco's "Reflections on the 'Name of the Rose'":

"Talking about a famous poem of his, I forget which, Lamartine said that it had come to him in a single flash, on a stormy night, in a forest. When he died, the manuscripts were found, with revisions and variants; and the poem proved to be the most 'worked out' in all of French literature."

[ZonkerHarris]

18. The yips can affect anything

[Maru Kitteh]

19. Not sure that's necessarily equivalent? Stuttering involves the repetition of

syllables A person can't move forward with their speech because they get stuck on a word or part of a word or a sound and it ends up repeating multiple times instead of being able to move ahead. That sounds different to me than what you describe.

For a writing equivalent to stuttering, I was going to suggest perseveration, which looks like this