All About Touch Typing

Touch typing is a skill that anyone can use. Whether you’re looking for an edge over your competition – like when you’re applying for entry level positions or you’re ready to climb the career ladder – or simply wishing to be more efficient on the computer in general, the ability to touch type quickly and accurately can help you get the most out of your keyboard time. But do you already have the ability to touch type? Assessing your touch typing skills really isn’t that difficult. In fact, the assessment basically comes down to whether you answer “yes” or “no” to one important question: Can you touch type already? Keep in mind that in order to type, your fingertips must “touch” certain keys. But the simple act of “touching” specific keys is not what touch typing is all about. Touch typing is really about the way you touch those keys. That’s because touch typing relies on memory, and the ability to type the correct letters in the correct order using the correct symbols, numbers and/or punctuation – without the need to actually look at the keyboard in order to locate the desired keys. When you know how to touch type, you don’t need to look. Your fingers will know where to go to find the correct letters, numbers and symbols because you’ve properly trained them to recall the correct keyboard location from memory. You’re a touch typist if your answer to this question is “yes”: Can you type the correct…

Touch typing is an important skill, but for many people the term “touch typing” causes some confusion. It’s true that in order to type – whether on a typewriter or on a computer keyboard – your fingertips must “touch” certain keys. Doing so is how you produce the desired words, or proper combination of words, numbers, and/or symbols. A lot of people believe that this simple act of “touching” specific keys is what touch typing is all about. It’s true that touch typing does involve touching. But to a greater degree, touch typing involves memory. You see, touch typing is the ability to type the correct letters in the correct order using the correct symbols, numbers and/or punctuation – without the need to actually look at the keyboard in order to locate the desired keys. When you know how to touch type, you don’t need to look back and forth between the keyboard and the screen. Your fingers will know where to go to find the correct letters, numbers and symbols because you’ve trained them to recall the location of those keys on the keyboard from memory. Please note that if you resemble the character Schroeder from the comic strip Peanuts while typing, you are not touch typing. Schroeder is the young boy who’s usually shown sitting hunched over his piano and using only his two index fingers to strike the different musical notes that correspond to whatever song he’s playing, which is typically something by Beethoven. We know people…

While it’s true that nearly every job requires some typing these days – since nearly every job includes the use of a computer in some way – the amount of typing that you need to do varies from job to job. Being able to type quickly and accurately is a skill that will help you in any field, but some jobs absolutely require top typing skills. Here are five jobs that you’ll be able to apply for after using the Typesy system to improve your typing speed. Captioning. The “closed caption” subtitles you seen on television, as well as subtitles for movies and other video presentations, are generally done by typists. Sometimes they’re done in real time mode, while other captioning jobs are project-based and done in advance. Medical Transcription. You’ll need a good ear and a good command of medical terminology, but the advantage of this field is that it can often be done at home, whether that’s full time or part time. The health field is a good and stable area to work, and because detailed notes need to be kept in each patient’s chart (and because the doctors and nurses don’t have time to write these notes themselves), there are thousands of pieces of medical dictation that need to be transcribed every day. Data Entry/Data Processing. Whether you’re entering catalog orders into forms or keeping a database updated, you’re providing the key link between customers and corporations when you’re doing data entry. Speed is important in this…

Back in the 1870s as the Industrial Revolution started to evolve into the Information Revolution and modern technological society needed more and faster ways of getting text and documents from one place to another, the first typewriters came into use in offices in the United States and Europe. The advantages of using a typewriter were significant: people didn’t have to worry about bad handwriting causing mistakes in orders or accounts, secretaries could learn to type much faster than they could write by hand, and business letters could all have the same professional look. The disadvantages of those early machines included typebars that would get stuck together or ink ribbons that would jam or go dry, and – before the correction tape and backspace key came onto the scene – it wasn’t very easy to go back and correct your mistakes. A typo at the bottom of one otherwise perfect page might mean that you’d have to re-type the entire thing from the top. Electric typewriters started appearing over the next few decades, but it wasn’t until the 1960s and the famous IBM Selectric that the electric typewriter really took off. This machine replaced the typebars (with one or two letters or symbols at the end of each narrow metal striking arm) with something called an element which had all of the letters and symbols on one easy-to-replace ball. Now offices could not only have professional quality letters, they could also easily change from one font to another just by switching…