I feel the need for typing speed
Typing speed is an under-rated skill.
If you’re somebody like myself who has a lot of interests but don’t have so much free time, typing fast can make a huge difference in your life. You can be so much more productive. Say you used to type 50 words per minute, and now you can type a hundred words per minute, you might finish your work twice as fast and have twice as much free time.
I’m going to go through some of the steps that I think are relevant to speeding up your typing skills. Things I have found to be helpful.
Proper hand placement
One of the things, according to Cruising University is using the correct starting position when practicing your typing skills, it’s important to use proper hand placement.
Start by keeping your fingers positioned over the ASD and F keys with your left hand. You will also want to keep your right hand over the JK L and semicolon key. In case you haven’t felt your keyboard lately, you’ll notice on a keyboard there’s these little on the J and F key which serves as a landmark for where you put index fingers. There’s a little bump protruding on the bottom of those keys on the F and J key to let you know that your index fingers are in the right place.
Don’t Look Down
Next thing is, don’t look down at your hands. It may be obvious, but if you do you’re not gonna learn how to type fast. You want to be able to transmit information from your head to your hands, without thinking about typing. Sort of like when you are driving. If you are experienced, you probably don’t really think very actively. It’s more automated than when you first learned to drive. When you start out driving and typing, you’re concentrating and focusing on every little aspect of what you’re doing, but eventually you become good at it. Then everything becomes automatic. The more automatic it becomes the faster you will be.
Good Posture
The next thing is to maintain good posture. As a doctor who deals with people who have back pain, because of bad posture, I can attest it is important for health. It’s also important for speed. If you are upright and not slouching, whether you’re sitting or standing and working at a desk, try to maintain your forearm at a 90 degree angle or greater relative to your upper arm.
That is going to make you type faster because you’re going to be in a comfortable position. You might also invest in hand rests and have a place to rest your elbows. Keeping your wrists slightly elevated can also help.
Practice makes perfect
Last but not least is practice. There are more than a few websites online that are free and excellent resources for learning to type. I’m not gonna go through all of the websites but to name a few there is typing.com, where you have different lessons that you can go through and it will show you the right finger placement. It will show you where you need to put your fingers and has different types of lessons for the novel typist to those who are more advanced.
You can see examples of typing.com and some other websites I discuss in the video I posted here. On Typing.com beginner’s lesson teaches proper hand placement. It shows how to move your fingers while typing. It also shows you the keys. If you’re not used to typing without looking down at your fingers then this is a way that you can transition. As I mentioned, they have intermediate and advanced lessons as well. You can progress through all of the lessons to refine your skills. Another popular website, recommended for kids, is the typing club website. Without going through it in detail it has animated character videos, demonstrating lessons prior to interactive sessions. Personally, I don’t do it because it forces me to watch a video and I would prefer to get straight to practicing typing. But if you’re a kid, or have one who wants to learn this valuable skill it may be a site that is worth looking at because it’s providing some basic instruction, fundamentals that I probably take for granted. This might be what you like and could be especially helpful if you aren’t sure about the right way to type.
There’s a bunch of other websites that are out there. I’ll share some of the links below, there’s typingtest.com, online.co.uk, sense-lang.org, rapidtyping.com. One that I find to be pretty good and have been using lately is 10fastfingers. If you go to 10 fast fingers, you can start off by taking their typing test (watch me take it in the video above) . One of the strategies I believe the site uses to teach you to type faster is to use the most common words that people type. Every time you practice on the site it’s training you to type the high yielding, most common words, faster.
You can go over here and get a baseline. Once you start typing, it will start recording your speed and it will also look at what your accuracy is. When I was first starting out I was around 50 wpd, I got to about 76 words per minute at my best with an accuracy around 94%. How does that rank compared to others?
Well, according to Google, the average typing speed is around 40 words per minute. You are considered to be very productive if you are around 60 to 70 words per minute. The average accuracy is around 92%.
If you didn’t pay attention to anything I have written until now, pay attention to this key point. The main thing you have to do is to practice. No it isn’t fun, But I’m gonna show you what they have on 10 fast fingers, which is almost fun. If you establish an account on fast fingers.com, you can do a typing test, different practices, you can put in your own text. Then they also have a multiplayer typing test, which I think is more fun than the other routine type of typing practices.
Based on my experience, I believe that if you practice for about 10 minutes a day, for a month, you can probably increase your typing speed by 20 words per minute. I probably really haven’t practiced that much in the past month, and I would say I’ve gone up around 15 words per minute already.
My target is probably to get up around a hundred words per minute. I think if I can do that, it will really boost me. If I can get to a hundred words per minute, I should be more productive at work, and have more free time.
Hopefully you find this video to be somewhat interesting, perhaps it may even motivate you to join me on this journey.
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