How to learn touch typing

Touch typing means typing without looking at the keyboard. That much is obvious, but the part people miss is that it is really a position rather than a trick. Your hands live in one place, the home row, and every other key is reached by moving a specific finger a specific distance from that place. Once the reference position is solid, every other key is a small calculation from a known starting point.

That is why the method works even when you cannot think about it. You are not memorising a keyboard picture; you are learning a coordinate system with your hands. It is the same reason musicians practise scales, and the same reason scales make the rest of the music easier later.

The alternative is hunting and pecking, where you look down, find the key, and press it. It works, and it is quick to learn, but it puts a ceiling on how fast you can go and it loads one hand with all the work. Most people who think they cannot touch type simply never had a reason to unlearn the habit.

1. Find the bumps. On a standard keyboard, F andJ have small raised ridges. Put your index fingers on them. If your keyboard does not have them, F and J are still the reference keys, and you can use a small piece of tape to mark them.
2. Place the rest of the fingers. The left hand coversA S D F and the right hand coversJ K L ;. Each finger sits on one key, slightly curved, with the wrist floating rather than resting on the desk.
3. Bring in the thumbs. Both thumbs rest on the space bar, which is comfortable for most people. Some typists prefer one thumb on the bar and the other onAlt, and either is fine as long as it is consistent.
4. Keep the elbows in. A comfortable position is roughly a right angle at the elbow, shoulders relaxed, and the keyboard close enough that you are not reaching forwards. A desk that is too high will undo everything else you do.

There is a standard order and it is worth following, because each stage only asks you to use keys you already know how to find.

1. Home row. A S D F,J K L ;, plus the space bar. This alone takes a surprising number of words to type, because most short words are made of these letters.
2. Middle row. G H on the left,N M and the punctuation on the right. The left hand now has a full row of its own.
3. Top row. E D C andR T F G V B. These are the keys that are hardest to reach, so they need the home row to be solid first.
4. Bottom row. X Z C V andN M, plus the comma, full stop and slash.
5. Numbers and the rest. Finally the number row, the shift keys and the symbols. Shift is the last thing to worry about, and it becomes automatic without practice once the underlying letters are known.

Thelesson pages follow this order, and the home row lesson is where to start.

• Short and frequent beats long and rare. Ten minutes a day for five weeks is worth more than two hours once a month. Motor learning consolidates during rest, not during more practice.
• Practise the hard part more. If a handful of keys are slow, write words that use them over and over. This is what thepractice drills are for.
• Do not chase speed while learning. Accuracy first, speed later. Chasing speed at the start builds the exact rushing habit that costs you the most later.
• Do not fix every error immediately. Correcting while you are still learning breaks the flow and teaches you to expect mistakes. Fix it afterwards, when the exercise is finished.
• Keep your eyes on the screen. Even while you are deliberately looking at the keyboard to learn a key, try to glance back at the text as often as you can. That is the skill you are actually building.
• Stop before you are exhausted. Twenty focused minutes beat an hour of staring at the same letters.

A fair expectation is that the first week is uncomfortable, the second week starts to feel automatic, and by the end of the third you are typing ordinary words without thinking about your hands at all. Most people reach forty to fifty words per minute somewhere in that third week.

The plateau that follows is the interesting part. Speed stops moving for a while, then starts to climb again as reading ahead develops, which is a different skill from knowing where the keys are. If you are stuck at that plateau, the answer is usually not more finger practice. It is reading further ahead, and that is what the typing test is for.