Science Says It's OK If Your Ten-Finger Touch Typing Is Total Garbage
Here's an embarrassing fact: I mainly use about six fingers to type, despite years of home key drilling and touch typing skill tests in my middle school Business Tech classes. I can get along at a pretty respectable 80 words per minute, but I just never picked up the habit of ten-finger touch typing.
Even as I type this article right now, I'm really only using my thumb, index, and middle finger of each hand as I type, with my right pinky occasionally flaring out to hit return and my left pinky hitting the shift key when I need to capitalize something. I rarely rest my middle finger on the home keys, my right hand jumps way over into the left side of the keyboard at will, and my ring finger rides the pine during the all this, doing nothing but watching as all the other fingers get all the glory.
Luckily, science is here to help me feel better about about my janky typing methods. A new study from Aalto University says it's not the number of fingers we use while typing, but how we use them.
"We were surprised to observe that people who took a typing course performed at similar average speed and accuracy as those that taught typing to themselves and only used 6 fingers on average," said doctoral candidate Anna Feit in a statement. In fact, they found that people using only five fingers could type just as fast as those using the traditional ten-finger touch typing method.
Feit and her team used motion capture to track each individual finger as it moved around the keyboard. The results are fascinating:
The basic gist of Feit's research? If you're happy with how fast you type, don't find yourself making significant errors, and are able to get by, there's probably no need to learn the ten-finger touch typing system. That said, her team does offer up three tips for those who want to speed up their typing:
If you do not want to spend many hours to learn how to efficiently use the touch typing system, you could try to remember the following:1. Keep your hands static. Move only your fingers towards the keys and try to keep the palms of your hands fixed on one position.2. Look at the screen. You'll be surprised how well you can type without looking at your fingers.3. Prepare upcoming keystrokes. Start with special keys, such as Shift, Backspace, or Enter, and move the unused fingers earlier.
Now get out there and type in peace, knowing that even if you've got some strange self-taught style, it's not better or no worse than what Mavis Beacon would have you do.
Source: Aalto University via Gizmodo
