Touch typing – detailed facts about this typing method
Most of us already heard about touch typing. Somewhere somebody said something about this skill. It becomes a sort of a mythical typing method that lets you type extremely fast.
Are those rumors true? How superior touch typing actually is? Is it this hard and unreachable skill to learn?
In this article, I will tell you all about touch typing and answer the more in-depth questions about this technique.
What is touch typing?
First, a quick word about the most basic question – what is touch typing? I made a whole article about touch typing basics and I won’t take much time answering this question.
If you want to read more about the fundamentals of touch typing, you can check out my article here – ARTICLE WHAT IS TOUCH TYPING
Now let me tell you in the short answer what touch typing even is:
Touch typing is a typing skill that’s based on muscle memory. This method lets you type without looking at your keyboard and has many great benefits to typing. Because of the muscle memory, you use all ten fingers to type. With touch typing, you can type as fast and even faster than the speed at which you talk.
Touch typing is a skill like many others. Everybody can learn it (except people with health problems, please don’t do things that would be bad for your health) but it takes time and effort. It’s not a skill that you can learn in 2 days. Not even in one week.
This brings me to the next question:
Is touch typing hard to learn?
There are two sides to this coin. Well, possibly you could find more. But we will focus on those two aspects of difficulty in learning touch typing: the amount of time it takes and the difficulty of practice itself.
Let’s start with the time it takes to learn touch typing. I have a whole detailed article just about the time it takes to learn this skill. If you want to read more technical details and see some data I’ve collected, you can read it here – ARTICLE TIME TO LEARN TOUCH TYPING
Here I will only tell you the results without the reasoning. It takes around one month to learn touch typing from the very beginning to the speed of 50 WPM.
It’s not an instant skill to learn. You need to spend at least a month to see any results.
Now let’s move to the second aspect of our question – Is touch typing practice hard?
The answer is no… if you have the right resources. If you know what to learn and how to learn it, then it’s pretty straightforward. However, it can be really confusing to figure out everything by yourself.
That’s why I’ve created an article about touch typing basics. That will be a great place for you to start. You can check it out here – ARTICLE TOUCH TYPING BASICS
Here you have everything above nicely summed up for you:
Touch typing is not a quick skill to learn. It will take you about one month to reach the speed of 50 WPM from the very beginning. It’s time-consuming but the practice itself is not hard. It is when you have the right resources and you’re following the right process when learning touch typing.
Is touch typing obsolete?
Is touch typing out of date? Is it no longer good? Maybe there are better typing techniques out there and touch typing is not worth learning no more? (By the way „obsolete” means „out of date”)
Just because this skill takes a lot of practice doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work. If it actually doesn’t work, then you probably learn some bad habits along the way.
Touch typing is not by any means out of date. It is still a valuable skill and a great typing method. Making use of muscle memory has great potential. It takes time to learn, but the results are well worth it. What’s even better is that once you learn touch typing it stays with you forever.
If my words didn’t convince you, look at the world’s fastest keyboard typers. They all are using touch typing to get those extreme speeds. It’s the same typing technique, some just choose a different keyboard layout.
If you want to know more about keyboard layouts and how they affect your speed you can check out my article. It’s all about keyboard layouts, starting from what keyboard layout even is up to the practical differences in typing performance. You can read it here – ARTICE WHAT IS KEYBOARD LAYOUT
Is touch typing actually faster?
Touch typing was created to make typing much faster. It is a method that from the very beginning was meant to let you get a great speed when typing. Did it succeed? Does touch typing do the job properly and actually increase your typing speed?
Not by itself. It is a technique, not a trick that just makes you faster. The method itself is very good. It has a lot of potentials and you can definitely get to those high speeds with touch typing. But it doesn’t end with the method itself.
Touch typing works because it makes use of muscle memory, which is very fast. There is one detail though – you need to build this muscle memory before touch typing even starts working. And you need to do that correctly.
Touch typing is definitely a great typing method. It has a huge potential when it comes to typing speed. Although you need to remember that it’s just a technique. A lot depends on the time and effort that you put into learning. Touch typing works because it makes use of muscle memory, which has to be built before it works.
There are better and worse ways to learn touch typing. There’s always a danger of learning bad habits which are really hard to correct later on. It’s very hard for beginners to recognize what is best and what is bad for learning.
If you’re one of the people who are just starting out, I can give you some resources that will help you. I made a whole series about learning touch typing based on my experience. Here is the first article of the series about the basics of touch typing – ARTICLE BASICS OF TOUCH TYPING
Does touch typing increase productivity?
Touch typing is a method that was created for speed. And the faster you type, the more things you can do in the same amount of time. Is it actually true? Does touch typing work like that?
From my own experience, I can tell you that the difference is huge. Typing before using touch typing compared to how I type now is night and day. This typing method did wonders for me.
If you want to read about the benefits of touch typing, check out my article. It’s where I share the results of learning this skill. Here’s my article on benefits – ARTICLE ABOUT BENEFITS OF TOUCH TYPING
Here I won’t talk about all the benefits. It’s just too much to fit in here. But from my experience touch typing has a great impact on productivity… if you type a lot.
That’s a detail I can’t skip. You can often hear how amazing touch typing is, and I confirm that it’s great. But if you don’t type a lot on your keyboard it just won’t work for you.
Touch typing has a huge impact on productivity. With this technique you can type much faster, meaning more done in less time. But there’s one detail, often skipped. In order to benefit from touch typing, you need to type a lot. If you cook as your job, touch typing won’t help with it.
I honestly recommend learning touch typing. It is a great skill to have. But don’t lie to yourself as I’m not lying to you. If you don’t type on your keyboard touch typing will be useless. You need to look with a dose of common sense and decide if you want to learn this typing method.
If you decide to start learning touch typing, I will give you some resources. I made a whole series about learning touch typing. Here I will give you an article about touch typing basics. It’s a great place to start. Here’s my article – ARTICLE BASICS OF TOUCH TYPING
Can adults learn to touch type?
The thing with muscle memory skills is that we often have very little knowledge about them. Even if we do, we think about riding a bike. It’s a great example of muscle memory skill, don’t get me wrong. But it doesn’t work for us because we learn it when we are kids.
This makes us think that only kids can learn skills based on muscle memory. It is simply not true. There’s no reason why an adult wouldn’t be able to learn this type of skill. It might take a little longer because we all learn faster when we are kids. Then we stop learning and our brain adapts.
Luckily though, it doesn’t mean that we can’t start learning again. Just as our brain adapted to no learning (or learning less than when we were kids), it can also pick up learning again.
Adults most definitely can learn touch typing. In fact, most of the people who learned touch typing did that way in adulthood. Don’t tell yourself that you can’t learn touch typing because you’re an adult. It’s just an excuse. What really might be happening is that you’re learning it wrong.
To learn this skill, just like any other, you can just start and push your way through. Then you can learn from your own mistakes. But it’s not a really efficient way to do this. You will learn a lot of bad habits, which will slow you down. You will need to change those habits.
There’s another way, just like with other skills. You can learn from a person who already knows it. That will help you a lot and prevent you from making bad mistakes.
Although my whole blog is here for you to learn, it is not all I’ve got. I made a course about learning touch typing. It’s for those who are serious about it and want to get the most out of this skill. I put all my experience with touch typing into this course to make learning better for you. If it sounds good to you here’s my course – MY TOUCH TYPING COURSE
Is touch typing a technical skill?
Alright, we know that touch typing is great and all of that. It lets you type really fast and with more comfort. But is this skill actually reliable when getting a job? Does it matter to employers when applying for a position?
Well, there’s no one answer to that question. There are many different jobs that you can take. Obviously, touch typing won’t matter when applying for a sports team coach. But when it comes to jobs like software engineering – it’s completely different.
Taking about coding – you need to type well. In fact, this is how you create your software. You think about it, you develop it and you type it using a keyboard. In this job you need to make as few mistakes as you can.
Imagine that all your work doesn’t function because of a small typo somewhere. With today’s developing software you can pretty easily find the place where it’s wrong. But no matter what it will cost you time. One typo after another and those add up pretty fast.
Getting to the point – touch typing might not be required at the first glance in many jobs. But when you include a valid certificate of your typing speed and accuracy you will definitely stand out a lot.
Touch typing might not be required to get the job you’re looking for. But when you learn touch typing and get a valid certificate it can become a great attribute that will make you stand out. It is especially true when it comes to jobs like software engineering. Touch typing will also make doing your job easier and faster.
I said that you need a valid certificate. What does it mean exactly? How can you get such typing certificate that will actually mean something?
Don’t worry, I’ve created a whole detailed article for you. It has all you need to know in order to get your typing certificate. You can read it here – ARTICLE ABOUT GETTING TYPING CERTIFICATE
What percentage of people use touch typing?
How many people actually can type using this technique? Well, it’s not that popular of a skill. Plus when I started my blog nobody else was teaching it. Finding information about touch typing was really challenging. I mostly learned from my own experience.
There are some people who use touch typing. But this skill is not very common. There also aren’t any worldwide statistics. Why would there be any?
Touch typing isn’t a common skill and requires time to learn. There are people who learn it and get great benefits from it. But it’s safe to say that less than 1% of people in the words can type using this method. Touch typing is a great skill to learn. If you type on your keyboard a lot you will benefit from learning it.
I am one of those people who learned touch typing. That’s why I can honestly recommend you this skill. Of course, if you need it. If you type a lot on your keyboard read about it and consider learning this touch typing.
