On Touch Typing

I decided recently that I needed to to some practice with my typing as I generally seem to get a little annoyed when I make errors when typing. I generally feel that making a typing mistake and then hitting the backspace key to correct the error to be too much of a pain even to the point that I just keep on going and let spell check deal with the mistakes later on. It just feels really good to keep on going, but it drives me nuts sometimes to see an error just sticking there on the screen that I eventually need to go back and fix it. To alleviate this problem, sometimes I just shut my eyes and just keep going on wit the typing, often to catastrophic effect.

In the old days, you'd usually have to buy software to practice your typing, but now with the internet, there are plenty of places online that you can take lessons for free. I decided to do just that. The first site I came across was here, which was the first site that popped up after a google search for me. So I decided to give it a shot.

My average wpm while for just transcribing text is about 60~70 wpm, but this does not count for errors and going back to fix them (I would assume that my speed would drastically drop once factoring in mistakes). I then tried out their lessons which involves something in the effect of what you might have learned from a touch typing class in high school, which basically is:

1. Hands on the home row
2. Practicing using your index fingers
3. Moving on wards to using the index fingers and middle fingers
4. Using your ring fingers or learning how to go up and down the keyboard
5. Etc

I find that learning how to type like this to be really unnatural to me as my hands and brain doesn't work like this at all. The first lesson where I was just using my index fingers went fine (using the 'F' and 'J' keys), as soon as the program started bringing in my middle fingers into the mix and incorporating the 'D' and 'K' characters into the lesson, I was thrown for a loop. My speed was just ridiculously slow and I had a hell of a hard time trying to get my hands working for me.

I believe that my hands have already some kind of muscle memory built into them as a result of learning to type words whole words instead of gunning for random letters. If I were given a set of random letters to transcribe, I would be at a terrible loss to type them at any sort of speed, where as I would end up being much faster at typing natural words. For example the word "The" I would my left hand only to type this word, though it would probably be more proper to use the right hand for the letter 'H'. I just figured that since my left hand was already doing the typing already, it just felt natural for the hand to do all of the typing.

I type predominantly with my left hand as most of the letters are located on the left hand side of the keyboard and with most of the punctuation located on the right hand side. As a result the span of my left hand is greater than my right hand as I ended up going as far as the letter 'H' with, my left hand and sometimes going as far as the letter 'U' in some cases. For example the word "you," since my index finger has already gotten to the letter "Y", after hitting the "O" my index finger is already beside the the letter "U" so I naturally hit it with my index finger of my left hand. Depending on the context through, I do also hit the letter 'U' with the right hand as well, so a good bunch of the keys that I use are shared between both hands.

If anyone ever bought me one of those ergonomic keyboards, I'd probably take it and kill them with it because it would be utterly useless for me. But still, I think my error rate for typing is still on the high side and with all my years of working on the computer, it still hasn't improved one bit. The question is that do I keep working with the current system that I have right now or do I throw it out and go with standard typing practices.

When I have some more time, I'll try my hand at transcribing written works and see if that helps. If it doesn't then I will consider learning a new typing style. With computers being such an integral part of a person's life it would make sense to have excellent typing skills.

My hand positions are also not fixed as they tend to glide around the keyboard depending on the words that I am using. For example, it would be standard to use just the ring finger to press for the letter "O." In my case, the finger that presses the letter "O" is generally my middle finger as my ring finger tends to be a little hard for me to control and when I do use it, I generally use my ring mainly for the backspace key or the return button.