If you’re like most people, you spend a significant amount of your day pecking away at a keyboard, but you may be frustrated with the speed and accuracy of your typing. Luckily, it’s easy to improve your speed with a few simple tricks.
Here are five ways that you can improve your typing speed.
1. Use Good Typing Fundamentals
If you don’t know them already, you should start with the basics. Familiarize yourself with the layout of your keyboard and learn the basics of touch typing – like where to position your hands and how to reach each of the keys from the home row. If you regularly enter large amounts of data, it may also be a good idea to learn the 10-key typing technique, which requires you to use the number pad on your keyboard to practice.
Also, don’t look at the keyboard while you type. This can be a hard habit to break if you’ve learned to hunt and peck while typing. Needing to look back and forth between screen and keyboard will put a limit on how fast your typing can be. If you want to maximize your typing speed, try learning to type by touch.
2. Learn Relevant Shortcuts
Every major operating system offers a number of useful shortcuts that allow you to perform operations – like undoing, copying, cutting and pasting.
Learning these shortcuts can keep you from needing to reach for the mouse every time you need to quickly undo or paste or a bit of text.
3. Use Typing Games and Tutorials
There are a huge number of typing games, programs and tutorials available on the Internet – both paid and free – which can introduce you to basic typing concepts and help you learn about different methods of typing.
4. Keep Your Work Environment and Posture Ergonomic
Spending long periods of time working on the computer can actually take a pretty severe toll on your body, especially your hands.
When typing, make sure to follow tips that keep both your posture and work environment ergonomic. Good posture and an ergonomic typing setup can help keep your typing speed high for longer and reduce the risk that you accidentally give yourself a repetitive stress injury when typing for a long period of time.
5. Practice!
As with any skill, practice makes perfect. Regularly learning new shortcuts, playing typing games or using typing tools will help you to naturally boost your typing speed over time. Research has found that the fastest typists are those who adopted the goal of deliberately practicing fast typing every day. While it may not be possible for you to practice every single day, practicing as frequently as possible is the best way to speed up your typing.
Regular practice will also give you a chance to practice typing fundamentals as well as keeping your posture ergonomic, which can help you both type faster and for longer.
How to Boost Typing Speed
Many of us spend a significant amount of our day typing, which means that faster typing is extremely useful. Luckily, if you’re not satisfied with your typing speed, there are a few ways to improve it. Over time, you can boost your typing speed by learning good typing fundamentals, establishing good typing posture and practicing regularly.
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