Mastering Touch Typing - How to Type Faster

What is Touch Typing?

Touch Typing is the skill of typing without looking at your keyboard. It is an advanced skill that takes a lot of practice and relies heavily on your muscle memory.

How do you master touch typing?

Many people who have grown up with a computer already has a basic mastery over touch typing. They instinctively know where the keys on the keyboard are. So, the first step to mastering the touch typing is to familiarize yourself with your keyboard. Open a new tab and open any sort of text editor (even your URL bar will do). Now, try to type the sentence given below without looking at your keyboard.

“A quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.”

This sentence is the shortest sentence that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet.

Now, depending on how fast you typed the previous sentence, you can skip the next few parts of this post.

If you think you typed it really slow while looking at the keyboard, continue reading.

If you think you typed it at a moderate pace with or without looking at the keyboard, you can skip over to part 2.

If you think you typed it really fast without looking at the keyboard, skip to part 3.

Part 1

So you think you’re a slow typer, huh. You must not have much experience typing. That’s okay! We’re all here to learn and grow together. To master touch typing, you first need to learn the basics. That’s what we’ll cover here.

For the next week, open a short story that you like from our page and start typing it out. It’s okay to look at your keyboard. The only important thing is that you need to keep typing without fail for (preferably) 15 minutes a day. You need to ingrain the location of these keys into your muscle memory.

Step 1: Memorizing

When you begin writing the short story, type the first paragraph while looking at the keyboard. Don’t try to manually memorize where the keys are. You are doing it subconsciously whether you like it or not.

Step 2: Alternating

After you’re done with the first paragraph, type the second paragraph while alternating. Type one sentence without looking at the keyboard and the next while looking at it. Keep alternating until you reach the final paragraph.

Step 3: The Final Stretch

When you reach the final paragraph, try to finish typing without looking at the keyboard. It’s okay to make mistakes. Ignore the wpm. Just finish typing without looking at the keyboard. You have made so much progress and you just need to finish the final stretch.

Congrats! You have already started touch typing. You will notice significant progress as days go by. Results are very easy to achieve because they are being ingrained into your brain and takes very little effort to do so. When you feel yourself getting better, try to start from step 2 or step 3 if you’re confident enough.

Once you feel that you know the general positions of the keycaps, you can move on to the next part.

Part 2

So you have moderate typing speed. This means that you already have a basic understanding of the keyboard’s structure, but you aren’t confident enough to start typing blindly.

The best advice I can give you, is to forget WPM. You don’t need speed right now. What you need is accuracy. You might not know where the keys of the keyboard are by heart, but your fingers remember. maybe not as clearly as others but it still has a basic understanding of where the keys are.

Open a short story on typers guild and start typing without looking at the keyboard. You might make a hundred mistakes but keep ignoring them. The goal here is to train your fingers to remember where the keys are. Try to finish at least one story a day and you will make incredible amount of progress in very little time.

If you’ve been able to type consistently without looking, you have already become an expert at touch typing. But you’re not here to be an expert. You’re here to be a master.

Part 3

So, you think you’re fast and you want to become faster. To do that, you first need to slow down. You need to learn how to use all of your fingers. Until now, you’ve probably been relying on two or maybe four fingers. But to master touch typing, you need to utilize all of them.

You need to categorize your keyboard into the sections shown in the graph. After that, open any book in the Typers Guild books section. Now form a mental imagery of the graph on your keyboard. Instead of typing without looking at the keyboard, try to type while you focus on the segregation as seen in the graph. Use only the assigned fingers.

As you get used to it, you can start touch typing very slowly while focusing on accuracy. Within few months, you’ll notice significant difference in your WPM.