How to improve typing speed and accuracy | 8 Simple Tips to Master Touch Typing

It is very simple to learn touch typing, but have you ever thought to increase your typing speed and doing this more efficiently and fast?  Then this article is for you, it contains a comprehensive list of tips that will show you how to type faster.

1. Focus on Sitting Posture

You may find it a small thing, but having poor posture while typing will get you in trouble. Because it can cause back pain, muscle fatigue and other serious problems.

Your typing speed will drop significantly even if you follow the other tips. That’s why it’s important to know how to position yourself before you start typing.

  • Your back should be straight and your feet should rest directly on the ground.
  • The top of the computer screen should be at eye level when you are sitting straight and tall and should be tilted slightly to meet your gaze.
  • Keep at least 45 – 70 cm of distance between your eyes and the computer screen.
  • Your elbows should be at a 90 degree angle to the desk and keyboard.
  • Еxpose the shoulder, arm, and wrist muscles to the least possible strain. 
  • Taking regular breaks, avoiding resting wrists on the desk for long duration.

2. Correctly position your hands and wrists

You have probably heard that practice makes perfect, but that’s not always the case. If you are not practicing properly, your practice could do more harm than good.

So before you start typing away, ensure that you are practicing the best habits for keyboard input.

You need to learn touch typing, in this method you have to use all your 10 fingers instead of two fingers.

Each finger of each hand only presses certain keys in particular. Thumb needs to be on the space bar at all times.

You can learn more about touch typing and techniques in here

3. Don’t look at the keyboard

This is the worst mistake. If you constantly look at the keyboard while typing, you cannot learn touch typing.

Therefore, try to remember the location of the letters, numbers, and symbols on the keyboard.

Once you get a good feel for where the keys are placed, break the habit of looking down while you type. It may seem very slow at first, but gradually you will increase your typing speed.

4. Don’t Rush – Focus on accuracy over speed

If you’re a beginner, and you’ve just started learning typing, don’t try to type words too quickly. This is absolutely the wrong approach.

Because when you’re in a hurry, you automatically switch to typing using a familiar method, for example, with two fingers, and forget everything else altogether.

Take your time, learn the correct approach for fast typing, get comfortable with it, and then accelerate when it feels natural to you. Fast typing is not a competition! First Go Slow then Speed Up

5. Don’t use phone to learn typing

Learning touch typing on your phone is a bad idea. After all you just use thumbs there. You get one advantage by learning from a real keyboard.

This way you remember the keyboard layout and you can easily type any text in future on both computer and phone.

But if you train on the phone, you’ll need to learn to type once you switch on your computer.

6. Set your own specific goals

Most people who say they want to increase their typing speed don’t make their goal any more specific than that. If you want to improve your typing speed set your own daily targets and long term goals.

As a beginner your everyday goal should be like this, I will practice touch typing for 20 minutes daily, you can set the duration as per your convenience.

But you have to practice regularly for that particular period without skipping sessions. Or being able to hit any key on the home row, 25 times in a row, without looking at the keyboard.

When you’ve achieved some mastery, your goals could be to pass a typical typing test at over 45 words per minute, type an entire paragraph without looking, or transcribe dictations of 250 words with fewer than 10 errors.

7. Fast typing requires good hardware

Finally, you have to consider a good keyboard. There are several types of keyboards, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages and you should consider which one you are going to start training on.

You should start with a regular keyboard, it’s good because it’s the most common, and once you get used to the key positioning on it, you’ll have no problem moving on to a more advanced keyboard.

The force required to press each key also varies for each keyboard, so play around with it a bit before buying one.

If you don’t want your fingers or wrists to hurt a lot after long hours, consider the hardware that’s best suited for you.

8. Use online test and resources.

One of the easiest, free ways to advance your typing speed and precision is to have fun with it. For this you can you use free available online resources for typing.

These tools are primarily designed to have following features:

  • Practice and improve typing skills
  • Test typing speed
  • Test typing accuracy
  • Learn healthy typing postures

 

 

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