Typesy offers several opportunities to further develop your touch typing skills, once you have mastered the basics of touch typing and want to concentrate on getting your typing speed up at or over 80-90wpm, or to aim for more than 90% accuracy in your typing. With quick review and practice courses that are designed to hone specific skills, you’ll be able to take that spare 15 minutes in your day and get a useful boost in your typing abilities.

Fast Typing Tonics are quick courses that you can use when you require further instruction regarding a specific aspect of typing. Each tonic is designed to take no longer than fifteen minutes to complete. Keeping the instruction short makes it easier to plan time to complete it.

Keyboard Tonic is an ultra-condensed version of the Home Row, Top Row and Bottom Row lessons taught during the Typesy Beginner course. This practice session reminds you which fingers go where so that, while touch typing, you can start relying more on your memory than your sight. Remember, constantly looking at the keyboard slows your typing speed and makes it difficult to keep track of your work.

The Speed Tonic consists of a series of computer generated drills that focus on typing speed. Use the Speed Tonic whenever you want to work on improving your touch typing speed.

Accuracy Tonic also consists of a series of computer generated drills. These drills are designed to help you improve touch typing accuracy.

Keypad Tonic is another course that takes fifteen minutes or less to complete. Like the Keyboard Tonic, this course offers an ultra-condensed version of the number row lessons taught during the Typesy beginner course. If you currently work with large batches of digits, or you will in the future, the Keypad Tonic is a must-do. You’ll be happy you did!

The bottom row on a standard computer keyboard contains the all-important space bar: the most frequently used key. Rather than being shaped like a square as the other keys are, the space bar is long and horizontal in shape. This key is shaped differently to make it easier for the thumb on either hand to access it. On most computer keyboards, the space bar is also wider than the other keys. The space bar may or may not be labeled.

If you’re not in the habit of pressing the space bar with one or both of your thumbs, then you are not a touch typist! But you will be once you start using Typesy to learn proper finger placement so you can develop your touch typing skills.

You’ll need to get into the habit of using both thumbs to hit the space bar, although most people generally use the thumb of their dominant hand for this key. That is, right-handed people tend to use their right thumb to hit the space bar, and left-handed people their left thumb. It doesn’t matter as far as touch typing skills go, unless you discover that you’re faster with one side or the other (or by using both).

One important thing to note about the space bar is that for the most part you’ll only hit it once at any point. As we mentioned in a previous post, the use of one space after a period instead of two is now the standard format, and using two spaces will create problems in formatting and spacing of larger documents. More importantly, it will significantly slow your typing speed down since you’ll be doubling the amount of time and effort you use to create the space between sentences.

If you’ve gotten into the habit of typing all lower case or worse, all upper case, you really should break this habit. Using mixed case when touch typing is grammatically correct, and gives your typed material a more polished and professional look. Even casual typists should do this. Capital letters should always be used at the beginning of each new sentence or question. Capital letters should also be used with abbreviations and acronyms, proper names and titles, the days of the week and months, cities and countries, movie, poem, song and book titles, and some brand names. There are other examples of capitalization usage, but these are the most common.

When typing, letters appear in lower case by default. If there is a situation where you need to type a series of upper case letters, you simply toggle the [Caps Lock] key on and off as needed. On a QWERTY keyboard, the [Caps Lock] key is located to the left of the letter A. Press once to turn [Caps Lock] on and all of the letters you type will be capitalized. Press the [Caps Lock] key again to turn this feature off.

However, when you only want to capitalize a single letter, or the first letter of a word, the [Shift] key is more appropriate. The [Shift] key also serves another purpose. Looking at the keyboard, you’ll see that most non-letter keys have dual purposes. For example, above the number 1 is an exclamation point, and a colon is above the semicolon. When you need to type an exclamation point, colon, or any of the other symbols or punctuation marks on the top of these dual purpose keys, you must also press the [Shift] key.

You’ll notice there are two [Shift] keys on the Bottom Row of the keyboard. One is to the left of the Z key and the other is to the right of the slash/question mark key. When touch typing, you press the [Shift] key with the little finger of the hand that is on the opposite side of the keyboard from the key you need.

In other words, to type an exclamation point, you will press and hold down the [Shift] key with your right-hand little finger while you press the exclamation point with your left-hand little finger. While this happens, your other fingers should remain on the appropriate home row keys.

Letters and punctuation make up the bulk of keys used by most touch typists. However, there will be times when you’ll need to type numbers. When you do, you have two choices. You can use the row of numbers located above the Top Row of letters, or you can use the numeric keypad, located on the right side of the keyboard. Feel free to choose whichever is faster and easier to use.

As always, you will start with your fingers in the appropriate positions on the Home Row. Then, when you want to type a number, you’ll stretch the appropriate finger up to the number and press. You’ll do this while leaving as many of your other fingers on the Home Row keys as possible. Sound difficult? It won’t be once you get used to these exaggerated finger movements. Like the Top Row and Bottom Row keys, proper touch typing requires that each number be pressed by a specific finger. The exercises and accompanying videos that cover this topic in the Typesy software system will help you remember these important finger-number-key relationships.

Many symbols are also found on the top row of the keyboard, the ones that share keys with numbers. Now, what’s interesting about these symbols is that they are used only occasionally. In fact, these symbols take up less than 1% of most text. Because of their infrequency of use, most touch typists do not actually touch type these symbols. Some do what you’ve been told you should never do: they look at the keyboard.

Not touch typing these symbols is okay because doing so will only have a negligible impact on your typing speed. When you continually look at the keyboard when typing letters, the time loss is significantly greater. If you want to become a proficient touch typist, you do need to know where these symbols are located on the keyboard. As you touch type symbols, it’s important to use the same finger as you do when typing the respective numbers. When typing a symbol, remember that you have to press and hold down the appropriate [Shift] key with the other hand before pressing the symbol key.