It doesn’t matter if you are a student, a professional, or a casual computer user, typing has become an essential digital competency for everyone in 2025 because of how it can dictate your productivity. If you want to learn typing, then you should focus on touch typing rather than hunt-peck typing with two fingers. Touch typing is the ability to type without looking at the keyboard and involves using all ten fingers efficiently to type.
The benefits of touch typing are many and any individual who is interested in his typing speed and accuracy should focus on learning touch typing. Learning touch typing requires patience, practice, and strategic methods, and here are six tips that can help you learn touch typing in an optimal way.
1. Start with Proper Finger Placement
The foundation of touch typing starts with proper finger placement on the keyboard. Every key on the keyboard is designated for a specific finger so that you can evenly use all the fingers of both hands without using only two or three fingers. The proper finger placement of touch typing involves the Home Row Positioning which involves:
- Left-hand fingers rest on A, S, D, F (thumb on the spacebar).
- Right-hand fingers rest on J, K, L, ; (thumb on the spacebar).
Home row positioning or finger placements require you to keep your fingers on the home row and return to it after pressing keys so that you develop muscle memory and it becomes much easier for you to improve your typing speed and accuracy.
2. Maintain the Right Posture and Hand Position
Your typing posture plays a huge role in determining your comfort level and ultimately, your typing speed. Incorrect posture can lead to huge problems for you including wrist strain, back pain, eye strain, and long-term issues like carpal tunnel syndrome. By following a proper typing posture, you can improve your comfort level so that it becomes easier for you to learn touch typing and avoid health issues.
- Proper typing posture requires you to:
- Sit upright with your back support.
- Avoid slouching.
- Keep your wrist slightly elevated and not resting on the keyboard.
- Adjust monitor height accordingly so that the top of the screen is at your eye level.
- Use a comfortable, ergonomic chair that provides optimum back support.
3. Focus on Accuracy in the Beginning
As a beginner, you will be tempted to improve your typing speed and score 100 WPM on a typing test but that is not how it works. Typing, like any other skill, requires you to practice and be consistent. Without practicing you cannot expect to improve your typing skills. A common mistake that most beginners make is that while practicing, they focus on their typing speed and less on their typing accuracy.
While as tempting as it is to type fast, errors and inaccuracy slow you down, hampering your typing speed and touch typing progress. If you want to improve your typing speed and learn touch typing, then your focus should be on improving accuracy and not speed. As soon as you start to focus and improve your accuracy, you will notice that speed will develop on its own because of better muscle memory.
4. Avoid Looking at the Keyboard
The basic definition of touch typing requires you to avoid looking at the keyboard and if you want to learn touch typing, you need to minimize looking at the keyboard at the start and then all together later on. The whole point of learning touch typing is to develop muscle memory and type without looking at the keyboard. As a beginner, it will be difficult for you to resist the urge to look at the keyboard but looking at the keyboard is a habit that can slow your progress and prevent true muscle memory from developing.
All the typing who can type up to 120 WPM do so without looking at the keyboard and if you want to do the same, then you need to break this habit and stop looking at the keyboard while typing to improve your muscle memory and make typing instinctive for you.
5. Focus on Speed After Accuracy
After you build accuracy and confidence that you can type well, you should then start working on improving the speed. Remember that learning touch typing requires you to be patient and you cannot expect to excel at touch typing overnight. Learning touch typing and improving typing speed should be a slow and steady process.
To improve your typing speed, you should start with timed typing drills like a 5-minute typing drill and then move on to speed tests like the 3-minute test to track progress. As you start to get better at typing, increase difficulty by reducing font size and forcing more precise keystrokes.
6. Practice Regularly, But in Short Sessions
Touch typing is based upon the principles of building muscle memory and muscle memory can be built only if you are consistent. The more you practice, the easier it becomes for you to build muscle memory and type instinctively. Therefore, practicing regularly in short sessions is what you should aim for instead of long sessions as short and frequent sessions are more effective.