How to increase your typing speed?
Type as you think! Increase your typing speed with these easy steps.
How frustrating is it when you have to spend 5 mins to write an email, which took you just 30 seconds to draft in your head? Imagine if you could type at the rate you think, double your typing speed, and never need to look down on your keyboard?
This is possible through a typing technique called Touch Typing. The global average typing speed is 40 WPM (Words per minute). With touch typing, the sky is the limit! I went from 43WPM with 88% accuracy to 75+WPM with 95% accuracy. The people I have learned from type at 160WPM! As I said, the sky is the limit.
Here’s what you need to know about touch typing:
You use all your ten fingers when you touch type. They’re placed at specific places and each finger is responsible for 3 keys and both index fingers are responsible for 6 keys.
Your index fingers go on J&F keys and the other 6 fingers go on a,s,d & k,l,;. Your thumbs are responsible for hitting the spacebar.
Just looking at this image won’t make your typing better. You need to practice. But how? That’s why you’re reading this. There are several levels to practice touch typing, till you finally reach a point where you’re satisfied with the results like I am.
Rookie: Keybr.com
Keybr is an awesome platform if you’re just starting out. It takes down your practice to just 3–4 keys in the beginning. So, instead of struggling to move all your fingers synchronously, you just need to focus on a few fingers and a few keys. As you move ahead it keeps adding keys to your practice set. After spending enough time on the platform, you get all the keys in your practice set and all your fingers involved.
Congratulations! You’re now a touch typist.
There’s a catch though. Your success on keybr doesn’t translate to the real-world typing experience. That’s because:
- Keybr doesn’t give you real words to practice. Just random combination of letters like inrt, nent, nilie.
- If you make a mistake, you can’t backspace and correct your mistake, as you’d do in the real world.
So now what? How do you actually get better in the real world? For that, you now enter Level 2, the intermediate.
Intermediate: Monkeytype
Monkeytype is the platform you want to move to after you have practiced enough on keybr and are comfortable moving all your fingers.
Why Monkeytype now?
- It offers you real words to practice on.
- You now need to backspace and correct your mistake.
One thing you still need to keep in mind, even though monkeytype offers you real words to practice on. But they’re just random words. Not sentences. You don’t have to deal with full stops, apostrophes, commas like you’d in the real world.
But does that hinders your progress? No. After you have spent enough time on monkeytype you’d see a tremendous difference in your typing speed and overall confidence. Now is the time that some common words will enter your muscle memory. So before you even think of it, your fingers would have jotted it down.
What now?
Learning touch typing starts off as frustrating, after a while it becomes fun and then it becomes your superpower!
There are more fun ways to learn touch typing after monkeytype. I still have some more pro tips to share, that I learned from my journey, that’d be too long for this introduction.
To earn this superpower faster and better, you can check out my free guide that’d teach you everything there is to know in 10 pages:
