Typing is a necessity in this day and age, whether it’s for recreation or for work. Unfortunately, a good amount of people do not type properly or quickly enough. Some people are surprised to find out that using two fingers to type isn’t the proper technique. In fact, they are even more surprised to find out that there actually is a proper way to type. Anyways, here are a few tips to help you type both quicker and more efficiently.
Learn how to type properly.
The proper method to typing revolves around the 10-finger typing style. Obviously, this involves keyboarding with all of your fingers. Without going into too much detail, your index fingers go onto the “F” and “J” keys while your other fingers line up on the rest of the keyboard. Each finger is pretty much “assigned” to specific keys. It’ll take a bit of practice for anyone that doesn’t already type like this, so your fingers won’t be used to this typing method at first. Within a few days, nobody should have any trouble typing with this proper method.
Many people will lead themselves to believe that their typing style is the best and quickest. However, it has been proven time and again that typing with the 10-finger method is most efficient in nearly every way. A person who switches to this method will slowly begin to notice that they are typing much quicker than ever before. Sadly, some people still use two fingers and end up typing around 30 words per minute or less. People nowadays are expected to type at least 70 words per minute for most jobs and similar things. Therefore, you’ll want to improve your typing as fast as possible if you’re a slow typist.
Obviously, staring down at a keyboard while you type is going to slow you down. Watching yourself type can decrease your speed greatly because you’ll spend too much time looking back and forth between the screen and keyboard or the keyboard and whatever you’re trying to type out. You want to increase your speed, so you should never be looking at the keyboard. Fortunately, memorizing the key strokes for typing is fairly simple and most people will learn how to do this fairly quickly by habit. As most know, it’s easily possible to watch T.V. or hold a face-to-face conversation with someone while typing. Anyone can type on a keyboard without watching the keyboard; a person who can’t is honestly just lazy.
Start transcribing text more often.
Transcribing text is the process of copying text from one place onto the computer. Fortunately, people will have to do this all the time if they are a student or work with computers for their profession. Students who hand write their essays and have to type them up later will do some transcribing. It is fairly easy to start transcribing efficiently because you should only have to look at the paper to transcribe the text onto a computer. Obviously, you shouldn’t be looking at the keyboard or even the computer screen. The purpose of transcribing text on a computer is to help you start typing more efficiently. On top of this, you should start to type much faster once you master transcribing text. You should even be able transcribe a person dictating sentences to you. Transcription is a great way to improve your typing skills, including your speed.
The less you think about typing, the better you will become at it. In fact, your speed should naturally increase at typing as you continue to use a computer. Of course, you will eventually hit a plateau. Most people hit a ceiling of around 80 to 100 words per minute. It takes quite a bit of hard work for a person to increase their keyboarding speed once they have hit that plateau. Also, typing is a fluid thing that shouldn’t involve much though. You will slow down considerably if you concentrate too hard on improving your abilities. Therefore, you should just forget about typing faster as you continue to type properly and without looking at the keyboard. I guarantee that you will increase your speed if you just don’t think about actually typing faster.
Use a program if you need to.
There are specific programs that are designed to help you increase your typing speed and accuracy. Typically, these programs require that you type various mixes of words and even numbers in one minute intervals and other intervals of time. You will get graded on your accuracy and your speed. After each exercise, some programs will tweak to your abilities and push you to improve both accuracy and speed. Nobody truly needs these programs, but a person who wants to type faster and more efficiently should definitely consider trying one out. The programs are fairly helpful for those that want to use them, so they aren’t necessarily a waste of money. Luckily, these programs are available from plenty of different places and the majority of them work very well with most people.
Undoubtedly, the only way a person can get better at typing is by actually using a keyboard. A person should start to pick up speed right away when they first start using the proper typing method. Those that have already been typing properly should already be keyboarding at a pretty brisk pace. Either way, everyone should be shooting for somewhere between 70 and 100 words per minute. In all honesty, these rates are pretty easy to obtain even for the slowest of typists. Most people only type slow because they use two or three fingers instead of all ten. Just keep on typing on a regular basis and you should see your speed increase over time. Obviously, nothing happens overnight.
