Practice finger placement. The key to faster and more accurate typing is proper finger placement on the keyboard. For those who use the hunt and peck method, you can become a quick typist, but only with proper finger placement can you truly achieve the fastest WPM (words per minute). On a standard QWERTY keyboard, the four fingers of your left hand should rest on the A, S, D and F keys while the four fingers of your right hand should rest on the J, K, L and semicolon keys. By using these keys as a home base for your fingers, you’ll have easy access to all of the keys on the keyboard.
Practice reaching. Start with the pinkie finger on your left hand. This finger should be used to type the lowercase letters a, q and z and will also be used for the Shift key and the Control key. Your ring finger on your left hand will be used for the letters W, S, X and also for capital Q, A and Z (as your pinkie will be holding the shift key). The middle finger on your left hand will be used for the letters E, D and C. Your pointer finger on your left hand will be used for the letters R, F, V, T, G and B. Your left thumb will simply rest on the space bar. The pointer finger on your right hand will be used for the letters Y, H, B, N, J and U. Your middle finger on the right hand will be used for the letters I, K and M. Your ring finger on the right hand will be used for the letters O, L and the comma key and your pinky finger will be used for the letter P the semicolon key, the period key, the apostrophe key, the shift key, the backspace key and the enter key. Your right thumb will be used for the space bar. Open a blank document and take time hitting each of these keys with the appropriate fingers. Make sure to practice uppercase and lowercase letters. Once you’ve practiced individual letters, try writing simple words using the appropriate fingers.
Try without looking. While it is relatively easy to get the hang of typing with the appropriate fingers, doing so without looking at the keyboard is a completely different matter. The only way to get faster typing skills is to look at the screen and watch what you are typing instead of watching your fingers on the keyboard. The easiest way to learn typing without looking at the keyboard is to place a cardboard box over the entire keyboard with a side cut out in the front. By doing this you’ll be able to reach the keyboard with your hands, but you won’t be able to see the keys you are typing with.
Take online typing tests. Once you have a feel for where all of the keys are on the keyboard, the next step is to practice keyboard typing online. The easiest and most effective way to do this is to take typing tests. Typing tests are designed to calculate your WPM as well as your overall accuracy. The tests will give you a random paragraph and a limited amount of time in which to reproduce it (sometimes 30 seconds, sometimes a minute). There are multiple typing test sites online (see Resources).