If you are in the writing business, a freelance writer, or an aspiring writer then typing with good speed along with accuracy is one of the crucial skills which can help you to win a spot in the writing world.
When Your typing speed improves along with word accuracy then the sentences and words emerging in your brain come as fast as you think which makes your writing better and your time more productive.
If you are a book writer and writing a full-fledged novel, which falls between 50,000- 2,00,000+ words for any genre or freelance write who has to complete his writing project and deliver it, their clients and if your typing speed is slower than it will take your 10x extra efforts and time to complete your work.
”A Flowing River Flourishes Life and a Slow Water Stinks”.
Don’t let this happen to your river of writing start improving your typing speed asap and let your imagination flow smoothly on the screen.
Jokes apart, now we will know the ways that can make you a keyboard warrior.
Contents
How to Improve Your Typing Speed (Step by Step)
Step 1- Begin with the basic starting position
Improving typing speed starts with learning proper hand positioning.
Home Row Position
- Rest your thumbs on the space bar and touch or hover over A, S, D and F with your left-hand fingers and J, K, L and ”: ;” with your right-hand fingers.
This is also called the home row position as the fingers always rest in this position and return back to the home row after typing or visiting the neighboring keys.
- Use the little raised line ”_” below F and J to position your index fingers and also use it as a reference for the position of other keys.
Watch the below video to get the idea of good posture for typing and home row key positioning on real-life keyboard-
After watching this informative video you may have got a good understanding of using home row keys.
Step 2- Keyboard Scheme
The keyboard scheme presents the key bar which belongs to a specific key strike group and needs to be touched by the specific finger for all the keys present in the group which is represented in the image with the same colored keys.
Fingers to use for keystrokes-
- Left Index fingers- 5, R, F, V, 6, T, G & B
- Left Middle fingers- 4, E, D, & C
- Left rind finger- 3, W, S & X
- Left Pinky Finger- 1, 2, Q, A, & Z
- Right Index Finger- 7, Y, H, N, U, J & M
- Right Middle Finger– 8, I, K & ,
- Right Ring Finger- 9, O, L & .
- Right Pinky Finger- 0, P, : ; , /, [, ],
- Strike the spacebar with any of your thumbs.
- strike the shift, caps lock, tab, enter and backspace with your pinky fingers.
Step 3- Touch Typing Technique
See the screen not the keyboard
If you are habitual of regularly texting or chatting with your friends, you may notice that you hardly look at the keypad which saves a lot of your time and makes your texting faster. So do the same thing here, don’t look at the keyboard.
The typing style is called Touch Typing where the typist doesn’t look at the keyboard and uses his muscle memory to remember the place of the key and improve the speed.
Initially, this will not look easy and take more time, but when you will start practicing and typing in this manner every day, soon your brain and hands will adapt to it and start remembering the positing of keys.
Again mentioning, If you have noticed the F and J key bars there is a little ”_ ” line coming out of the key bars which actually helps us to get a sense of the position of the other key bars without looking at the keyboard so that we can type fast without looking down every time.
Remember the positioning of the key bars and practice typing without looking at the keyboard.
Step 4- Remember the shortcuts
Assume you typed a long word like simplification, representatives or hippopotamus word wrong then to clear it you have to strike the backspace key more than 10 times, but when you press the shortcut key [control + backspace] you will clear the incorrect word in one press.
So watch the below video and learn some keyboard shortcuts which will save lots of your time and makes your typing faster.
Step 5- Practice makes a man perfect and women too.
First, start practicing with this phrase ”The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.
The above phrase may sound silly but it’s a magical phrase to help you improve your writing speed.
Whenever you will practice typing this phrase you will strike all the twenty-six letters of alphabets and your brain will start remembering all the positions of the twenty-six alphabets.
Take an online test and know your typing speed first.
Take a text on 10 Fast Fingers and know your current typing speed.
There are many online resources that can help you to practice and improve and increase your typing speed.
Keybr is one of them, a great website to practice and improves your typing as it helps to identify your weak keys and helps to work on them by repeating them in your writing and they give many great lessons to increase the typing speed.
The average typing speed of an average typist is 40 words per minute and the fastest typing speed record is 212 words per minute by Stella Panjunas from Chicago, if your speed is below this average or you want to improve further then you have to start working on your typing.
