#2 My Month with: Touch Typing

Hello again,

Firstly, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, I hope everyone had a great time doing whatever you decided to do.

So this month was a fun one because I have wanted to do this for a while now and it helps me out a lot during Uni and stuff like that. This month I taught myself how to touch type.

That is a slight lie, because I knew the fundamentals of touch typing, but it was way quicker for me to go ahead and use the old two fingers on each hand typing technique than for me to use all fingers. So what I did was more just reinforce good habits more or less.

Touch typing is becoming more and more essential in todays world, as we move further and further away from pen and paper toward the digital platform, being able to touch type could theoretically greatly increase productivity and project completion speeds. For me, in a more contemporary sense, it is going to allow me to actually keep up with the lecture slides, as I can type and look up at the same time now. But nonetheless, being able to touch type is going to become a very admirable trait in the future that is unfolding before us.

Now I know a lot of schools are currently teaching their students how to touch type, but mine did not and thus it was thrust upon me to teach myself, with a little help from free online courses. So I started by using typingclub to help me get a grasp of which fingers I use for what, and then after that I just did the typing test on 10fastfingers to help me reinforce good habits. At the start of the month I was typing at around 40wpm, and now over the month I am typing at anywhere between 60-65wpm, an improvement of 25wpm. I am by no means perfect at this, I still make a lot of mistakes and there are some corrections I need to make with fingers being in certain places as certain times, but I have definitely improved.

I want to emphasise that getting the correct finger placement and using the correct fingers is vital in touch typing, not only so you know where your fingers are when you aren't looking at the keyboard, but also because if you don't use all your fingers, then this with severely inhibit your ability to type fast. It is all about knowing which letter comes next and being able to get one of your fingers on that key as quickly as possible, and a combination of watching the screen and using all fingers is going to be very beneficial in achieving those two goals.

To conclude, I think touch typing is a very important trait that often goes unnoticed, as it is not something that you would put on your resume or bring up in an interview, however it is definitely something that can be hugely beneficial in the workplace. If you have the time (it is very cheap/free) to learn, then I would definitely recommend learning to touch type, as it helps you out in so many ways.

godspeed,
galvin

*once again, this is all my opinion, and also I am not advertising those two sites, as there a numerous amounts of typing tests and teaching aids that I am sure would be beneficial.