Many people refer to Touch Typing as the “Most Useful and the Most Important Skill” they’ve ever learnt in school.
Understanding a few ideas about typing will get you a solid ground for improving your typing rate and eventually will make you a fluent touch-typist.
But what is touch typing in general?
- Touch typing is the ability to type without looking at the keyboard. Touch typing differs from the hunt-and-peck method, where users must locate each key visually, as touch typing allows for faster, more efficient, and error-free typing by eliminating the need to expend cognitive effort on finding keys.
Touch typing means you can type without even looking at the keyboard. It’s like your fingers just know where all the keys are without you having to think about it. With hunt-and-peck typing, you have to constantly look back and forth between the keyboard and the screen to find the right keys. That slows you down a ton and makes it easy to make mistakes. Touch typing is a skill that lets you type as fast as you can think, almost like the words just flow straight from your brain to the screen!
What makes Touch Typing a superior way of typing?
Touch typing becomes substantially more efficient when utilizing all ten fingers, as every key remains within easy reach of a finger without needing to pivot the wrists. This optimized hand positioning and lack of excessive wrist movement instantaneously improves the ergonomics and reduces strain during typing sessions.
By training to type with all ten fingers through the touch typing method, the full keyboard layout is accessible through simple finger motions alone. This eliminates disruptive wrist pivots, making the typing process far more fluid, rapid, and ergonomically sound compared to hunt-and-peck styles limited to fewer fingers
Why can’t all people touch type?
Touch typing is not a natural skill that people are born with. Even in our modern digital age where computers surround us, typing efficiently on a keyboard remains a very specialized skill requiring the coordinated use of all ten fingers. However, we don’t use all ten fingers equally in daily life. Certain fingers, like the index fingers, tend to be more agile while others, like the pinkies, lag behind in dexterity.
Because we don’t naturally develop equal agility across all our fingers through typical activities, an intentional approach is often needed to train the peripheral fingers for touch typing. Simply trying to self-teach isn’t enough. Proprioceptive keyboards that provide physical cues and targeted finger dexterity exercises are frequently required to build up the muscle memory and coordination across all digits. Only through dedicated efforts or approaches can most people overcome the lack of inherent equal dexterity among their fingers required for true touch typing prowess.
What is so great about Touch Typing?
Touch typing is a powerful skill that can unlock new levels of productivity, focus, and creativity. By training your muscle memory to type without conscious effort, you essentially offload a cognitive burden, freeing up valuable mental resources. This allows you to achieve a state of flow, where your thoughts can move freely without being disrupted by the mechanics of typing.
In this “default state of mind,” your brain is liberated from the distractions and cognitive load associated with hunt-and-peck typing. You can fully immerse yourself in the creative process, whether you’re writing, coding, or generating ideas. Your thoughts can flow effortlessly, uninterrupted by the constant need to locate keys or correct errors.
Touch typing is not a natural skill for most people because it requires intentional training to override our instinctive hunt-and-peck tendencies. While some individuals may attempt to learn on their own, the process can be slow and inefficient, often leading to frustration and abandonment before mastering the technique.
Our innovative approach combines multisensory learning methods that engage multiple senses simultaneously, accelerating the acquisition of this valuable skill. By integrating visual, auditory, and kinesthetic elements, we create a more effective and efficient learning experience, helping you internalize the touch typing technique more rapidly.
The true benefit of touch typing extends far beyond mere typing speed. It’s about unlocking a heightened state of concentration and creative flow, where your ideas can take shape without the constraints of physical typing limitations. Imagine being able to translate your thoughts into written form with minimal cognitive friction, allowing your creativity to soar.
Focus – is arguably the most valuable asset in life.
It is easy to loose our focus during typing if we have never mastered touch-typing and are in need to shift our sight between the screen and the keyboard back and forth constantly.
Mimicking typing movement is clearly not difficult. A toddler will learn the tapping motions before learn how to talk. However mastering typing and being effective with it – is a journey.
In spite of existance of highly developed voice-recognition algorithms, typing remains an easily accessible way of entering information and it does not require much explanation.
Just like any other skill, if it is not mastered correctly from the beginning – it becomes a “broken” habit, which is harder to fix with time.
Efficient typing relies on two essential abilities.
- Using only specific finger on each key.
- Developing finger agility.
Once you become aware of these two secret ingredients, which make up the typing skill – you will learn to control the fingers efficiently. After mastering the basics of the correct finger layout – your speed will start picking up.
1. Using the right fingers for each key.
In order to master the memory of the keyboard layout, all we need is to practice typing, with or without seeing the keyboard; the more we move our fingers from key-to-key in repeatable manner – the stronger becomes our tactile memory. Just like it takes time to become good at any sport – it takes practice to become good at typing .
This is why typing games – is a good way of learning typing.
Learn correct finger positioning from the beginning.
Be wary of the wrong finger placement. Your fingers will learn the behavior that you will teach them. And if you have not learnt proper finger placement at the beginning, your fingers will be no help for you, when you will be typing later on.
What is correct finger placement? The “touch-typing” layout.
There are four fingers on each hand, which should be striking the letter keys.
The thumbs are used to strike only the spacebar.
The index fingers are the most “privileged” here and control two columns each. The ring finger, the middle finger and the pinkie – should be controlling only one column of the keys.
This finger layout is well-known as the “touch-typing” layout. The benefits of having “in charge” of specific groups of keys are those that there now all finger moves are minimal, and even with closed eyes a person would be able to type without typos. Please note, that keys with letters “F” and “J” have little bumps on them. This is to help you always locate these keys by simply hovering over with your fingers.
2. Developing finger agility.
We might be familiar with the keyboard layout since the times we did not remember ourselves, when we were children.
What is noticeably harder to achieve – is finger agility. (How many people may claim that their pinkies are involved in typing as much as the ring-finger). The further we get away from the index finger – the harder it is to control our fingers.
However, even this skill is a subject to training. Just like in any sports, the more we are involved in an activity – the better we get. Similarly, it is important to let those idling fingers in typing. I encourage you, from now on, to start using all fingers all the way to the pinkies and the result will not make you wait.
Why seeing a keyboard will not hurt your typing skills?
There is an unsupported belief that in order to master blind typing, one should “never-ever look at the keyboard”. However there are multiple proofs that the opposite is true:
SEEING THE KEYBOARD HAS POSITIVE EFFECT ON LEARNING THE KEYBOARD LAYOUT .
In a number of experiments held at the VIATYPING Innovations lab. an opposite conclusion was made: seeing the keyboard is crucial to learning 10-finger typing. In addition, seeing the keyboard helps establishing better hand-eye coordination, which ultimately helps speeding up the training of your fingers.
How long does it take to improve?
fact: On average, 1 hour of practice improves your typing rate by 1 WPM (Words-Per-Minute). f.e. if you want to improve your typing speed by 10 WPMs – you need to spend 10 hours practicing.
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