Typing courses?

[Rob_Royale]

So I've never learned to type. I type while looking at the keyboard and then after a line or two, I look a the screen and then go back and correct my mistakes. Lather, rinse repeat. I've written 180k words that way, and frankly, it's getting old.

At this moment, it seems like I'm going to be doing this for a while and I'm actively trying to improve as a writer. So I think part of that should be learning to type better. I am old enough that typing courses were taught in high school on typewriters and my first computer training was on a TRS-80, but I never really learned to type.

Has anyone used any online courses or apps to learn how to type? I'd appreciate any recommendations.

 

[alohadave]

I don't have recommendations, but learning to touch type is a valuable skill. When you have practice at it, you'll be able to type while looking at the screen, not the keyboard.

Your typing speed will go up, but even though I took it in high school (on IBM Selectrics), I never got more than 25 WPM. Typing speed isn't that critical unless you are a secretary typing dictation (and I don't that that's very common nowadays).

After a while, you'll be able to type without thinking where the keys are, your fingers will move to the automatically.

 

[Jorunn]

And after you learn to touch type, your fingers will fly faster than your mind. Thus, you will think of a sentence, but your fingers will have already typed most of the sentence while your mind moves to the next sentence in your story. Unfortunately, somewhere in the sentence your just typed, your fingers inserted a different word than the one you had in your mind! (Ugh!)

 

[yowser]

The key is to get your typing speed to match your brain speed. Any faster is a waste.

 

[SeraphNocturne]

I learned through school, I clock around 94 words per minute with 98% accuracy. Buuut I'm up to 94 wpm from around 88, when I switched over from using my phone for writing to getting back to a full keyboard I was a bit sluggish and accident prone. Typing.com offers lessons for free!

 

[joy_of_cooking]

You type 88wpm on a phone without a keyboard?!

 

[joy_of_cooking]

Has anyone used any online courses or apps to learn how to type? I'd appreciate any recommendations.

I know a couple of people who relearned how to type as adults after getting along with various kinds of hunt and peck for a while. They both changed keyboard layouts to break their bad habits. Dvorak and colemak. Sounds kind of extreme but it worked for them.

If you do stick with qwerty, try https://www.typing.com/student/lessons

 

[MillieDynamite]

I type by looking at the screen while I tap away on the keys. I can even look out and check out what the kid and pet are doing, then return to the screen. Typing is a touch thing, not a sight thing. But if you are self-taught, that may never happen. My Pops would blindfold me and tell me to type something like, the red swift fox jumped over the log, ten times in a row. I had to keep track of how many times I typed it, where I was in each repetition, and he'd talk to me while I typed.

 

[Stimtheone]

I do programming, so I learned to type from my work. But I'd suggest anyone writing such texts to learn how to do it without having to check the keyboard.

 

[Euphony]

Comfortable keyboard makes a difference.

I used to think they were all basically the same w/QoL features being the main differentiator but that was severely misguided.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Almost all keyboards have little nubs, a slash, or rough spot, on the F and J keys. Those are your home keys.

 

[Fatdog25]

Google free typing tutors. Step by step instructions for free.

They usually have a test section. I've used those for warm ups.

 

[KeithD]

Typing. The most useful class I took in high school--and the greatest retention of knowledge from a high school class.

 

[alohadave]

I know a couple of people who relearned how to type as adults after getting along with various kinds of hunt and peck for a while. They both changed keyboard layouts to break their bad habits. Dvorak and colemak. Sounds kind of extreme but it worked for them.

If you do stick with qwerty, try https://www.typing.com/student/lessons

Unless you know that you'll only ever use your own computer and never need to use a different one, QWERTY is what you should learn.

The efficiency gains of Dvorak are dubious and overstated, especially if no one else has that layout.

 

[MillieDynamite]

The original keyboard layout was different, putting the most used keys on the right side of the keyboard and the least used on the left. But those keyboards used springs, leavers, and actually keys. The typest could type so fast the keys jammed up one atop of another. So they changed the layout. No one ever went back and changed it back to the Dvorak layout. I type at 96 words a minute from reading text and somewhat less when I'm writing. On the other hand, my father typed at 110 words a minute reading what he was typing, and faster than I do when I'm reading what I'm typing when he is typing his thoughts. He fucked up the keys on typewriters all the time in the old days.

 

[StillStunned]

I tried something like this for a while:
View attachment 2286735
It was very comfortable, but you really need to be able to touch type. And I can't.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Now that's so space age.

I tried something like this for a while:
View attachment 2286735
It was very comfortable, but you really need to be able to touch type. And I can't.

 

[TxRad]

Everyone wants to type faster but how orderly are your thoughts at that speed? My thoughts are way faster than my typing but that doesn't help my story telling to be readable. You need a balance of the two. my three finger typing produces around 1800 words an hour and most are usable words.

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

Has anyone used any online courses or apps to learn how to type? I'd appreciate any recommendations.

I can wholeheartedly recommend Tipp10. I recommended it to a few relatives before, and they spent about two hours on the thing before they had it down.

 

[SouthernCrossfire]

I don't have recommendations, but learning to touch type is a valuable skill. SNIP

Your typing speed will go up, but even though I took it in high school (on IBM Selectrics), I never got more than 25 WPM. Typing speed isn't that critical unless you are a secretary typing dictation (and I don't that that's very common nowadays). SNIP

I agree, it's quite valuable, both in the workplace and when writing for profit or pleasure (like most of us). A good course should allow you to focus on the words and what you want to express rather than the locations of individual keys on the keyboard.

My high school typing experience sounds a little like Dave's. Our class had three IBM Selectrics and the rest were manuals. The girls always got the electric typewriters for practice and usually for speed drills since the teacher felt that they'd be far more likely to need to the skill (dictation and other secretarial duty) and the speed in the workplace than the guys; computers started hitting the scene shortly thereafter to prove that view as shortsighted as it was sexist. However, I did get to use one of the electrics once in that course and clocked 32 words per minute compared to my usual 32 to 34 on the manual. The electric was more sensitive so while I advanced more words, I made more mistakes to more than make up for it.

I found an online typing test a few years ago and, 40-something years later, tested at 50 to 52 words per minute over several tests. That's good when I'm typing reports from my on-site notes for work or writing stories for Lit, but a large part of most reports and all of my stories are composed on the go so the typing is a whole lot slower than that.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I've used various voice-to-text applications. The problem is, that it doesn't do the commas, colons, semicolons, or periods. And when I'm talking, I don't think about them.

 

[Euphony]

I've used various voice-to-text applications. The problem is, that it doesn't do the commas, colons, semicolons, or periods. And when I'm talking, I don't think about them.

It's been a minute for me but I remember workarounds.

If you'd rather not speak unnaturally (saying the punctuation) some software out there allows for natural punctuation, accurate enough for the work-a-day marks but anything remotely nuanced will need manual adjustments.

Another thing that helped me was using voice recordings as the dictation engine than fighting it with live listening.

Maybe it better meshed with the software or maybe I unconsciously slowed down but it made a notable difference in the final output.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I learned through school, I clock around 94 words per minute with 98% accuracy. Buuut I'm up to 94 wpm from around 88, when I switched over from using my phone for writing to getting back to a full keyboard I was a bit sluggish and accident prone. Typing.com offers lessons for free!

Thanks, Angel. Also @joy_of_cooking and @OverconfidentSarcasm for their recommendations.