Okay, so I’ve adopted an interesting method of typing. I’m able to type without looking at the keyboard, using a random combination of my pointer and middle fingers of each hand. I’m pretty quick, but my accuracy is pretty poor – I tend to his nearby keys, and thus have to go back and correct fairly often.
Ideally, I’d like to learn true touch type, but I always get bored and frustrated before getting too far. It’s odd, even though I know which letters are where with my current method, I can’t remember where any of them are when trying to use the home row method.
So, any suggestions on how I can learn to touch type? Oh, also, how do I know which keys should be pressed by which fingers? I always get confused. For instance, should “R” be pressed by my middle finger, or pointer fingers?
I learned how to type at the tender age of ten, when my dad bought me a program called Typing Tutor. For me it was like a game (and it actually had a game just like Space Invaders, only the invaders were words and you had to type them accurately before they hit the bottom of the screen) so I picked it up quickly.
That was 19 years ago, but I’m sure typing programs have only improved since then. You can probably just download them, although I would guess the free ones aren’t going to be as good.
The “R,” FTR, is typed with your pointer finger. Correct typing feels funny at first–esp. if you’ve been inventing your own method–but it’s so much faster and easier once you get the hang of it.
Mavis Beacon taught my mother to type quite quickly. There are many similar programs that will probably do as good a job, and may be cheaper (or free!).
In our high school typing class, they made us put a dish towel over our hands while we typed to break us of the habit of looking down.
I did a speed test using the SHIT system (Search & HIT aka Hunt/Peck) and got a pitiful 29 WPM with 6 mistakes.
Here is the sample text:
I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me, to whom the sun was servant, who had not gone into society in the village, who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow.
Once you learn what finger goes on which key, the other thing that will build speed is practice. Lots and lots and lots of practice. Just keep doing it.
I learned to type fast after I got my own personal computer in my room. I just gradually learned myself through using the computer, never doing any structured typing practice.
I use an Apple keyboard, the white one. I like it because the keys are basically coplanar, so I can slide a finger from one key to the one below it. That especially helps if I’m typing with one hand. The keyboard is a little small for the best normal two-handed typing though.
I suggest Typer Shark for a fun online game to improve your typing speed. So much fun. It mixes up numbers, words, random letter, and punctuation as the levels progress. The initial ones are pretty easy, but you must improve or be eaten by sharks. Or piranhas.
I don’t think it would take terribly long to beat that rate. It will depend on how long (and how much) you’ve been typing with your own method, but I know that when I learned to type, I hit 40 wpm very quickly. These days I type around 65 wpm from copy, a bit faster when I’m just typing on my own. If you really focus on learning and typing a lot for a few days, you should catch on and hit or exceed your current speed.
I learned in the dark ages, on a typewriter, from a “Teach Yourself to Type” book that grandma gave me as a high-school graduation present. Helped me get the temp job that got me in the door where I’ve been working now for 17 1/2 or so years.
I’ve never really examined my typing before, but I think I do something similar to the OP. Most of my strokes are made either with my middle or pointer finger. However it’s not a hunt and peck thing more of a floating above the keyboard thing with my entire hand moving. I got 77 WPM on the test linked to by don’t ask, so there is nothing necessarily wrong with typing that way.
The link don’t ask provided looks like a decent tutor, I’d give that a try before shelling out a few buck for a computer program. Or see if your library has something, maybe a computer program, maybe a book. I don’t know if they still make the books like the kind I learned with back in the 70’s where the book is spiral bound at the top and you can stand them up, but it was a very good format.
I took a full year course when I was in high school, but I seem to remember the second semester was mostly dealing with the forms of letter, reports, etc, things that Word does automatically these days, so I would suppose with some effort, you could learn to type in a 6-8 weeks, perhaps less. Don’t rush it, the brain rebels when you try to learn everything at once. Take it in easy steps and don’t move on until you’re comfortable with each lesson.
True speed comes when you learn to type words rather than individual letters. I’ve been doing a few lessons at typeonline.co.uk and am quite slow on the first lessons where you learn each letter and I nearly triple my speed when I’m typing words. This mostly comes with experience.
Or you could do as my mom did when teaching my siblings and I to type and go with a scorched earth policy. She mounted a printout of a keyboard layout next to the monitor and then blanked out all the keys with stickers. You wanted to know where a key was? Look at the diagram.
Mom was trained as a secretary and she took her typing seriously. She does general office management now and has worn a significant number of the letters off her keyboard. Drives her grandkids nuts when they come to her house and can’t use the computer because so many letters are worn off the keys.
If you can find a copy, Sega’s “Typing of the Dead” is a pretty excellent typing practice tool - it doesn’t really teach touch-typing, but it gives you a heck of a fun way to practice what you do learn. If you’ve ever played the “House of the Dead” zombie arcade games, it’s just like that, except you kill the zombies by typing words floating above their head instead of shooting them with a light-gun. The faster you type, the faster they die. Fun stuff.
Some years ago, after years of hunt-and-peck and finding that I was limited by it (probably at 20-something wpm) I forced myself to touch-type, for periods of time. Just conciously not looking at the keyboard, taking as much time as necessary to think through where the correct key was and which finger to use. With this discipline, I gradually increased the length of time I could do this for and also decrease the amount I needed to think about it.
That I was doing this while putting together academic writing, rather than copying from type, meant that I was focussed only on the screen and not on another text as well, which allowed me to see mistakes in real time.
I got 71wpm on the test linked to, with no errors (although I had to correct several along the way). The limitation of the way I taught myself showed up in things like ‘Ashburnhams’, where I slowed down considerably. Common short words and phrases, which I’ve typed thousands of times and importantly will have been ones I was using at the time I forced myself away from hunt-and-peck (‘and yet’ or ‘it was possible’), are ones which I fire out rapidly.
I’m really, really fast. Never took a course or used any software.
Way, way back, in the Dark Ages before personal computers, I was accepted at a high school for (allegedly) gifted young men. The school told us, and our parents, not to show up for the first day of school without knowing how to type. My father bought me a portable electric typewriter and made me spend a couple of hours a day over the summer between grammar school and high school learning how to type. I did.
It’s a handy skill. During periods of un- or underemployment, I’ve made pretty good money working as a word processor at New York law firms. It’s a good fallback skill. One can pull in up to $40 per hour if one can type fast enough and has a solid knowledge of MS Word.
