Capital letters

To type a capital, one hand holds shift while the other presses the letter. Which hand does which is decided by the letter: a left-hand letter takes the right shift, a right-hand letter takes the left one.

London: left shift and l, then o n d o n

The shift on your own hand would drag that hand off the little finger key and stretch it. The opposite shift disturbs nothing, because the other hand is idle anyway.

Leave Caps Lock alone. It switches on a state that you forget to switch off, and it does nothing for your rhythm. The one place it earns its keep is a whole line of capitals.

During the drill both keys light up on the keyboard: the shift and the letter. Press shift before the letter and release it only afterwards.

Practise

• Left little finger
• Left ring finger
• Left middle finger
• Left index finger
• Right index finger
• Right middle finger
• Right ring finger
• Right little finger

The drill uses capitalised names, because that is where shift really turns up. At the start of each word, look at which shift lights up.

Touch typing lessons

Introduction

• Where speed comes fromFast typing is not fast fingers but overlapping movements and learned sequences.

Home position

• The home rowEight keys the hand never has to leave. Every keystroke starts here, and the finger comes back here.
• Home row wordsThe first real words, typed without moving a single finger off the home row.
• The index finger keysG and H are the only home row letters that make an index finger step aside.

Letters

• The top rowThe finger goes up and slightly left, the hand stays where it is.
• The bottom rowThe most awkward of the three rows, and for that reason the one most worth drilling.
• The little finger keysThe little finger has the most keys and the least strength.
• All the letters togetherThree rows at once, in real words. This is where typing actually begins.
• Same-finger sequencesTwo letters with one and the same finger are the slowest thing in typing, and worth a drill of their own.
• One-handed wordsWords that come out entirely with one hand. This is where the weaker hand shows itself.
• Alternating handsWords where the hands change over after almost every letter. This is where the rhythm comes from.

Capitals, punctuation and digits

• Capital lettersA capital always uses the shift on the opposite hand. That is the whole rule.
• PunctuationA comma or a full stop is part of the word, not something beside it.
• DigitsThe digit row is far away and out of sight. The only thing that helps is the right column.

Speed and accuracy

• Frequent letter pairsSpeed comes from a pair becoming one movement, not from a single keystroke getting faster.
• Frequent wordsA couple of hundred words cover most of everything you will ever type. They are worth a drill of their own.
• An even rhythmAn even pace beats bursts and pauses, even when it feels slower.
• Accuracy before speedA wrong letter costs more than a slow one. In the game too.
• Whole sentencesCapital at the front, full stop at the end, and every part working at once.

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