Select text practice: a pretend page to pick words on

Picking words on a real computer or phone

• Picked words look different. They usually show on a colored background, often blue. Programs say the words are “selected” or “highlighted”.
• Sliding across (dragging). With a mouse, words are usually picked by pressing the button just before the first letter, keeping it down, sliding to just after the last letter, and letting go. Nothing is settled until the button is let go: sliding back takes letters out again.
• Two quick clicks on a word usually pick that one word. Sometimes the space after it comes along, and the pick often stops at a dash, a colon or an @ sign, so a number with dashes in it is usually picked by sliding.
• Three quick clicks often pick the whole line or the whole paragraph the pointer is on.
• Click, then Shift and click. In many programs, clicking where the pick begins and then holding the Shift key and clicking where it ends picks everything in between. This helps with a long stretch, where sliding is hard on the hand.
• Shift and the arrow keys. On many keyboards, holding Shift and pressing the right or left arrow key makes a pick one letter longer or shorter. It is a way to mend a pick that is a letter off.
• “Select all” picks everything on the page or in the box at once. On many keyboards it is Ctrl and A; on some computers it is the Command key.
• On many phones and tablets, pressing on a word and keeping the finger there picks it, with two small handles that can be pulled to take in more. A small menu usually comes up beside it.
• Letting go of a pick. One click or tap somewhere else usually lets it go. A new pick takes the place of the old one: there is usually one pick at a time.
• Picking changes nothing. Picked words stay as they were. What comes next is what does something: Copy, Cut, bold, or a key.
• Typing over a pick. In a place where typing works, such as a form box or a document, pressing a letter key while words are picked usually puts that letter in their place, and the picked words are gone. “Undo”, on many keyboards Ctrl and Z, usually brings them back.
• A slide that begins on picked words can move them to another place in some writing programs, instead of making a new pick. Clicking once somewhere else first, and then starting over, avoids that.
• Not everything can be picked. Words that are part of a picture cannot, and some pages and buttons do not let their words be picked.
• Look at both ends. A pick can miss the first or last letter, or take in a period or a space. Looking at where the color begins and ends, before copying, catches that.

How the lessons work

• The pretend screen is the light-colored box. The white sheet in it is “A pretend message”: six sentences about a visit that does not exist, with a made-up room, a made-up confirmation number and a telephone number that is not a real one.
• The picking is real. The sheet is a box of words, and your device picks words in it the way it does anywhere else, by mouse, by finger or by keyboard. Nothing can be typed in it, so nothing on it can be changed or lost. A key that would change the words does nothing.
• The yellow line under the sheet begins “Picked right now” and says what is picked at every moment, and whether that is what the step asks for, more than it, or part of it.
• “Next step” answers only while the thing the step asks for is picked. Until then it is gray. On the last step of a lesson it says “Finish the lesson”.
• Spaces are let through. A space or a line end at either end of a pick does not count against it here, because two quick clicks sometimes bring one along. A period, a letter or a number too many does count.
• Lesson 3 asks for “2:30”, “KR-4471-B” and “555-0134”, each with nothing else. Lesson 7 makes a pick for you that stops short, and asks you to make it whole.
• Lesson 6 picks everything and then lets go of it, to show that the page is as it was.
• The page waits. There is no countdown, and taking a long time costs nothing. At the end it says how long the lesson took, from the first time the pointer went into the pretend screen. A pick that was off is not counted and not kept.
• “Start this lesson again” asks for other words.

Every time the page is built, a program makes 32,000 lessons, half in English and half in Spanish, and walks through their 96,000 steps on a copy of the pretend page of its own, written apart from this page’s: that the thing each step asks for is on the page exactly once, that the step names it in full, that no step is already done when it begins, that picking exactly the thing ends the step, that a letter more or a letter less does not, and that both languages ask for the same kinds of thing in the same sentences.

What this page does not do

• It copies nothing. Picking is the step before Copy; what Copy, Cut and Paste do is in Copy and paste practice, on a clipboard that can be seen.
• It cannot do the picking for you or show you how your device does it. It says the usual ways in words; your mouse, trackpad, phone or keyboard may do it another way. In a library or a job center, the staff are the ones to ask.
• It has not been tried by us on a touch screen. A program tried it with a mouse and with a keyboard in one browser. Pressing and holding with a finger, and pulling the handles, were not tried; on some phones the pretend page may answer in another way than the steps say.
• It does not look like every program. The color of a pick, the small menu, and what two or three quick clicks take in differ from one program to the next.
• It does not teach picking a picture, a file, a row of a table or several things that are apart from each other, or picking in a place where typing works. Picking files is in Files practice, and steady sliding with a mouse is in Mouse and trackpad practice.
• It cannot see how the pick was made: by sliding, by quick clicks or by keys. It sees only what ended up picked.
• 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, the arrow keys with Shift, and Enter), but it has not been tried with a screen reader, a switch or an eye tracker.