Copy and paste practice: two pretend pages to learn on

Copy, cut and paste on a real computer or phone

• Picking comes first. Copy and Cut go to what is picked (programs say “selected”). With a mouse, words are usually picked by pressing the button at the first letter, holding it, and dragging to the last; clicking twice quickly on a word usually picks that one word. Picked words usually show on a colored background.
• On many phones and tablets, pressing on a word and holding the finger there picks it, with two small handles that can be pulled to take in more. A small menu with Copy and Paste usually comes up beside it.
• “Copy” leaves the words where they are and puts a copy on the clipboard. On many keyboards it is holding the Ctrl key and pressing C; on some computers it is the Command key.
• “Cut” takes the words away from where they were and puts them on the clipboard. On many keyboards it is Ctrl and X. Cut and then Paste is how something is moved.
• “Paste” puts what the clipboard holds where the blinking line (the cursor) is. On many keyboards it is Ctrl and V. Clicking in the place first is what puts the blinking line there.
• The clipboard is where the copy waits. On most computers and phones it cannot be seen, and nothing announces that a copy was made: the only sign is that Paste works.
• One thing at a time. The clipboard usually holds only the last thing copied or cut; the one before it is gone. Some computers and phones can also keep a list of the last few, where that is turned on.
• More than once. What is on the clipboard usually stays there after a paste, so it can be pasted again, in another place or another program. It usually goes when the computer is turned off.
• The right mouse button. Clicking with the right button on picked words usually opens a small menu that has Cut, Copy and Paste in it. Many programs also have them in a menu named Edit.
• “Select all” picks everything on the page or in the box at once. On many keyboards it is Ctrl and A.
• “Undo” takes back a paste or a cut that landed where it was not meant to. On many keyboards it is Ctrl and Z.
• The look can come along. Words copied from a web page often bring their size and color with them into a writing program. Many programs offer a second kind of paste, with a name such as “plain text” or “keep text only”, that brings the words alone.
• Some boxes do not take a paste. A few forms block it in certain boxes, such as one that asks for an email address a second time. There, typing is the only way.
• Look at what landed. A copy can miss the first or last letter, or take in a space at the end. Reading a pasted number against the one it came from takes a moment and catches that.
• On a shared computer, what was copied can stay on the clipboard after you are done, where the next person could paste it. Copying something plain afterwards usually takes its place. This matters most for a password or an account number.

How the lessons work

• The pretend screen is the light-colored box. At its top are the names of two pretend pages, “A pretend message” and “My pretend notes”; a click on a name brings that page to the screen. Under them is a row of five buttons, and the white sheet is the page.
• The yellow line that begins “On the pretend clipboard” says what the clipboard holds at every moment. A real clipboard shows no such line; this one is here so that what Copy and Cut do can be seen.
• A click on a line picks the whole line, and the picked line gets a blue edge. A real program picks words by dragging across them; this page does not ask for a drag.
• “The empty line at the end” sits under the lines of each page. A click on it puts the blinking line there, and that is where Paste lands. On a real page the blinking line can go anywhere, between any two letters.
• The ready-made pages. The message has five lines about a class that does not exist, and the notes have one line, “Things to remember”. Every lesson begins with them as they were.
• Only the step at hand answers. The step is written above the pretend screen. If something else is clicked, the page says what it was, and the pretend pages stay as they were. Nothing can be broken.
• Lesson 2 cuts a line and pastes it at the end: the page still has five lines, in another order. Lesson 4 copies one line and then another, and the paste shows which one the clipboard kept.
• The page waits. There is no countdown, and taking a long time costs nothing. At the end it says how many lines each page has and what the clipboard holds, shows both pages as the lesson left them, and says how long the lesson took, from the first time the pointer went into the pretend screen, and how many times something else was clicked.
• “Start this lesson again” picks other lines.

Every time the page is built, a program makes 32,000 lessons, half in English and half in Spanish, and walks through their 176,000 steps on pretend pages and a pretend clipboard of its own, written apart from this page’s: that the thing each step asks for is on the screen when it is asked for, that using it changes something, that the step is said in full, that nothing but the step’s own thing answers, that no step asks for a line whose words are on the page twice, and that the pages and the clipboard come out the same in both.

What this page does not do

• It never touches the real clipboard. Nothing copied here can be pasted anywhere else, and nothing copied somewhere else can be pasted here.
• It does not teach the hand: dragging across words, pressing and holding on a phone, the right mouse button, and the Ctrl keys are not practiced here, only named. Dragging is in Mouse and trackpad practice, and the keys are in Typing practice.
• It does not look like every program. Real ones differ: Copy and Paste are often small pictures with no words, or sit only inside a menu, and on a phone they appear only after something is picked.
• It does not teach copying a picture, a file or a link, pasting as plain text, or a list of things copied before. Copying and moving files is in Files practice.
• It pastes whole lines at the end of a page. Pasting into the middle of a sentence, or over words that are picked, is not here.
• It cannot say how a real computer or phone does this. In a library or a job center, the staff are the ones to ask.
• It does not keep your times or which lessons you have done, gives no certificate and makes no promise about how fast anyone will learn.
• It can be worked by keyboard (Tab, Enter and the space bar), but it has not been tried with a screen reader, a switch or an eye tracker.