An Introduction to Keyboards — Improving Your Typing

Touch Typing

You may have heard of touch typing and what it really means is correct finger placement. Knowing where the keys are from muscle memory so you don’t need to look down to see where to place your fingers as the time to process can be significant.

What this takes to do is make sure you start your hands in a home position with your left index/pointer finger on the F key (QWERTY layout) and right index/pointer finger on the J key and the rest of your fingers placed over each key horizontally out from those. You can find them without looking too because the F and J keys will most often have some kind of bump or ridge to distinguish them from other keys.

Your thumbs should naturally come to rest over the space bar key.

Keyboard Layout

The home keys noted above only work in the QWERTY layout, you could probably get special keys to do the same for other types of layouts but what I will suggest here for improving your speed is to stick to QWERTY.

I used to believe that it would be worth the effort to learn one of the more exotic layouts but the amount of effort and friction and continuous problems in my opinion don’t make it worth it for the gains. The main supposed gain is potential speed but some of the records broken in speed typing have been with QWERTY layout.

Learn the basics first with the least resistance and when an accomplished touch typist at decent speed then look at ways to improve beyond that if you want.

Although there are ways to increase your typing speed without actually physically typing faster.

This post was created with Typeshare