How to Improve Your Typing Speed and Accuracy

One of the most essentials skills to have been discontinued from teaching during your schooling age is typing. Although people tend to underestimate the value of typing faster and accurately, it is one of the most fundamental skill required in any field you wish to pursue. Be it in writing Emails, writing a blog post, or writing copy, typing is one of the most important skills. As a blogger, typing faster and better will save you a tremendous amount of time spent proofreading your article for typo mistakes and crafting the article itself. While the average typing speed is around 38-40 Words Per Minute, the world-record for the fastest typing speed is of Stella Pajunas, who struck a whopping 216 WPM on an IBM Electric Typewriter! Typing accurately is also just as important as typing faster is. There is a speed-accuracy tradeoff that has to be considered when you begin practicing typing faster. Faster is not always better if your accuracy is getting compromised in the process. Aiming for a faster and accurate typing speed is essential. Finishing that assignment, blog article or just an Email quickly and saving yourselves some amount of time in the process is a great way to make room for other tasks. Having written over 10 million words in all forms off written words, I can justify how valuable improving your typing speed and accuracy is. With the majority of the audience here at ShoudMeLoud being bloggers or wannabe bloggers, it is the time that you work on your typing speed, while not compromising on the accuracy part of it.

How to type faster & get things done fast

Now that you’re convinced about the importance of typing faster and accurately, let’s move on to the how’s of it. Here are six ways to significantly improve your typing speed and accuracy.

Rework the way you type

The first step to improving your typing speed and accuracy is to reconsider the way you approach typing. The moment you sit down to get some typing done is what decides everything that follows next. During our Ergonomics and human factors class, we’ve been walked through all the fundamentals of proper posture, backed by numbers, to avoid Cumulative Trauma Disorders (CTD). To begin with, proper posture is the first step in preparing yourself for success. Without working on a proper positioning and typing habit, one cannot achieve high typing speeds while maintaining acceptable accuracy levels.
To get started, make sure that you are sitting upright and with your back not leaning forward towards your desk. A proper upright position helps increase concentration levels and will give you the needed focus boost to type efficiently. Secondly, the way you position your wrists and elbows also make a considerable difference in typing faster and accurately. Make sure that your elbows are always positioned at right angles to the keyboard and that your arms are not bent upwards or downwards. This bending of your arms will make it harder on your forearms or wrists if not positioned properly. Apart from a proper posture of your body, proper positioning of your fingers is also essential. Below are a few methods to position your fingers for typing faster:

• The left-hand pinky finger being placed on the ‘A’ key and responsible for all the keys to the left of it including left shift, caps lock, control/cmd, etc.
• The right-hand pinky key being placed on the Colon/Semi-colon button and being responsible for everything on the right of the key.
• Position at least one of your thumb on the Spacebar key.
• The ring finger, middle finger and index finger of your right hand should be placed on the keys S, D, and F respectively.
• The ring finger, middle finger and index finger of your left hand should be placed on the keys L, K, and J respectively.

Eyes away from the keyboard!

If you might have ever attended some sort of typing classes, you could remember the way tutors used to force people to type without looking at the keyboard. The sub-conscious mind is pretty powerful and as you type daily and more often, you will develop the habit of typing faster and not looking at the keyboard while doing so. Looking at the keyboard while typing reduces one’s typing speed and the written words are more prone to errors as you are not aware of what’s being typed into it. Although this means more errors initially, this technique itself will be the reason for your increased typing speeds. A little bit of cheating is permitted, where you can peek once in a while at the keyboard, but try to look away from the keyboard as much as possible as you are typing. Looking away from the keyboard and the screen during typing aides in real-time copy-editing, saving you a lot of time in the end. You easily get used to the layout of the keyboard and the positioning of the keys as you work your way without looking at the keyboard much often.

The Quick Brown Fox!

“The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog”

Does the above sentence ring any bells to you? This special sentence has every alphabet of the English language in it. It is also one of the primary reasons you would find most fonts illustrated through this very sentence. This special sentence would also help you improve your typing accuracy, with some practice of course. Practice typing by typing this sentence repetitively. Although you are bound to make some mistakes early on, over the long run you’ll benefit much from this sentence alone.

Practicing this sentence multiple numbers of times will help you understand the positioning of all the alphabets on the keyboard. This understanding will help you achieve better typing accuracy while you are working on the improving of your typing speed. Get well-versed in the positioning of all the keys on the keyboard by practicing this sentence often times.

Repetition is good, sometimes!

While repetitive and monotonous tasks are no good in boosting your creativity, practice does make one perfect! Try to practice some amount of typing daily to keep the skills you’ve been accruing over the past couple days and weeks. A 30-minute of daily typing will help you tremendously in improving your typing skills and achieve a better accuracy rate while typing faster. Set a certain goal according to your present typing speeds and try to aim a bit higher the every other time around. With practice and patience, over time you will witness your typing speed improve significantly. Remember Malcolm Gladwell’s famous statement in his book Outliers on learning anything you wish to-

“It takes 10,000 hours to master anything”.

Although that would be a significantly large number for learning to type faster, growing complacent is a worse way to damage everything that you’ve been working on in the past. Work on your set WPM goals daily, by trying to avoid affecting your typing accuracy in the process.

Make the most of online tools for typing:

While you can improve your typing speeds by daily practice or by joining some kind of typing classes, there are also certain online tools which you can use to improve your typing speed. With the rise of the number of tools available online for each purpose, here are some of the best online resources you ought to check out for improving your typing speed and accuracy.

1. QWERTY Warriors – A typing game to improve your typing speed and accuracy by demolishing oncoming attacks by words!
2. Sense-Lang Typing resources – The best resource for free typing tutorials, games, tests, certifications and much more.
3. Typing Test – Check your typing speed and accuracy with this free complete typing test.
4. Typing.com – Another free typing resource to work on your typing right from a beginner to advanced level.

Blog more often

Another great way to remain focused on practicing typing daily while also improving your writing skills is by blogging daily. This would help you improve your language and also your typing speed and accuracy. Frequent diligent updating of your blog, web page or for an online journal will help you remain focused on improving your typing speed and accuracy. This way you would also be making some good use of your time and giving you a productivity boost in the process. If you are not yet ready to get started on your own blog, try to consider publishing articles on Medium and other such platforms to work on your thought processing, language, and typing speed. An essential part of improving any skill is through rigorous patience, persistence, and hard work. Do not expect anything to come easily and try to work your way towards it. Practice accurate typing often and in no time you’ll see yourself typing lengthy pieces of articles in significantly lesser time. What do you think about these tips regarding improving typing speed and accuracy? Have any more suggestions that you would like to add to this list? Shout out with your thoughts and comments on typing faster and accurately below.