Hi,
I have been facing a lot of issues with my typing off late and thought I will key in my personal experience to help anyone else who might be facing the same issue.
Well to begin with I was never required to type so much other than a couple of adhoc scripts for automation where my typing speed was not judged. But off late I have changed my career path to that of a developer and now I need to type a lot and almost in a regular fashion. This caused me realise that I could not type very fast when I am not looking. And it is impossible to type looking at the keyboard unless you are typing something in English that does not have to deal with any line of code. And yes I agree most season coders do not need to look up while they are typing. But hey I just said I have changed my career path I never said I have marveled at it.
Well then here are my realisations which may help someone to improve their speed and make less mistakes while typing. I am taking about more than 40 words per minute of typing.
1. I understood that the keystrokes I did was based on my experience and not the actual knowledge of the keys. So that's they real key (pun intended) . You need to wire your brain to the actual position of the keys. You can actually improve your accuracy by typing a little slow. If I want to type at 30 words per minute I will make less mistakes and hence improve in accuracy but who wants to get slow in this fast age.
2. The keyboard itself. The keyboard may be doing you more harm than you can possibly think of. The layout and the design of the keys matter a lot. If I am writing something in Mac or Surface I make 10-20% less mistakes the keyboard is very smooth and welcoming for me to type but some keyboard like lenovo V330 series can be a real pain. The Lenovo X1 has a much better keyboard and to work with. So do not beat yourself up if you are making a lot of mistakes while typing it might be a good time to upgrade your laptop/dekstop/keyboard.
3. Auto correction does fix a lot of issues and you tend to ignore it but it surfaces when you are writing a tech code and you have a intellisence included client to work on but still make more mistakes than you expect it is because you always had been making those mistakes but the autocorrect was fixing them fast enough for you to ignore.
4. The key stroke mistakes that I do are off by just one or two keystrokes and then it occurred to me that it is a lack of discipline. The keys have to be assigned a left and a right hand and they need to be used with only that hand. The error in keystroke happens only when I used the wrong hand. For instance I have trained my left hand to press g but if I use my right hand then I am bound to make a mistake.
5. When we are coding we might be working on multiple screens and this may cause us to look at right or left while writing a code and that makes us think the keyboard is also a little oriented in that direction and that can cause us to move our hands a little further than we normally do. This can be fixed by keeping the screens really close to each other.
Well these are some of the basic things I felt are making my life more miserable than I thought it would. All said if you just practice for 5 minutes on a daily basis to type looking at the keyboard and then 5 minutes looking at the screen it will help you in the long way. And you will see improvements almost immediately.
Let me know what you think on my findings and let me know if it helped you.
Thanks,
Tushar Kanti
I have been facing a lot of issues with my typing off late and thought I will key in my personal experience to help anyone else who might be facing the same issue.
Well to begin with I was never required to type so much other than a couple of adhoc scripts for automation where my typing speed was not judged. But off late I have changed my career path to that of a developer and now I need to type a lot and almost in a regular fashion. This caused me realise that I could not type very fast when I am not looking. And it is impossible to type looking at the keyboard unless you are typing something in English that does not have to deal with any line of code. And yes I agree most season coders do not need to look up while they are typing. But hey I just said I have changed my career path I never said I have marveled at it.
Well then here are my realisations which may help someone to improve their speed and make less mistakes while typing. I am taking about more than 40 words per minute of typing.
1. I understood that the keystrokes I did was based on my experience and not the actual knowledge of the keys. So that's they real key (pun intended) . You need to wire your brain to the actual position of the keys. You can actually improve your accuracy by typing a little slow. If I want to type at 30 words per minute I will make less mistakes and hence improve in accuracy but who wants to get slow in this fast age.
2. The keyboard itself. The keyboard may be doing you more harm than you can possibly think of. The layout and the design of the keys matter a lot. If I am writing something in Mac or Surface I make 10-20% less mistakes the keyboard is very smooth and welcoming for me to type but some keyboard like lenovo V330 series can be a real pain. The Lenovo X1 has a much better keyboard and to work with. So do not beat yourself up if you are making a lot of mistakes while typing it might be a good time to upgrade your laptop/dekstop/keyboard.
3. Auto correction does fix a lot of issues and you tend to ignore it but it surfaces when you are writing a tech code and you have a intellisence included client to work on but still make more mistakes than you expect it is because you always had been making those mistakes but the autocorrect was fixing them fast enough for you to ignore.
4. The key stroke mistakes that I do are off by just one or two keystrokes and then it occurred to me that it is a lack of discipline. The keys have to be assigned a left and a right hand and they need to be used with only that hand. The error in keystroke happens only when I used the wrong hand. For instance I have trained my left hand to press g but if I use my right hand then I am bound to make a mistake.
5. When we are coding we might be working on multiple screens and this may cause us to look at right or left while writing a code and that makes us think the keyboard is also a little oriented in that direction and that can cause us to move our hands a little further than we normally do. This can be fixed by keeping the screens really close to each other.
Well these are some of the basic things I felt are making my life more miserable than I thought it would. All said if you just practice for 5 minutes on a daily basis to type looking at the keyboard and then 5 minutes looking at the screen it will help you in the long way. And you will see improvements almost immediately.
Let me know what you think on my findings and let me know if it helped you.
Thanks,
Tushar Kanti
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