*&a!dj The benefits correct typing

I have always marveled at people who typed swiftly; even more so if their ten fingers were doing the job.

Admit it. You're one of those people who burdened their four fingers (which by human dexterity would mean your left and right index and middle fingers) with typing. I know I have. Well for us 'untrained' typists, the more important thing is to accomplish the job, which is to churn out keyboard characters on the screen, and not bother with the difficult rudiments of dealing with the keyboard. I know I wouldn't like to be bothered. Not especially if I am writing.

However, I think that correct typing is a life skill which many of us apparently neglect. Especially in this day and age of computers, which the use of a keyboard shall not fade anytime soon, we are facing a lifetime of challenging our four fingers to do the job which was made for all our ten fingers to accomplish. Typing is not something we could do away with, especially for students, office workers, call center agents and the like. And so, improving our typing technique would not only be beneficial for us, but also for our work, and even for school.

In my former job (yes I only had one), I was really amazed at how my boss effortlessly swept the keyboard with all her fingers and spewed characters on the screen. I'm not sure of her typing rate, but I'm confident that it would be in the hundreds. And she was a blind typist too. She could type correctly without even looking at the keyboard, or even the screen. I was amazed by her skill that the question I had after she discussed something about work, was how she learned to type like that. She told me that she used to work for a paging company (remember pagers?) and that is where she got the hang of the keyboard.

The product is as important as the technique. I believe that her former work was not entirely the reason why she developed a skill such as hers. The correct technique would account for the chunk of it. And that is where practice and learning comes in.

We all know that hard habits die hard. I bet that most of us have learned our way through the keyboard without typing tutors and the like. While it may be difficult to modify the way we type (yes after establishing a feat of 150wpm with just four fingers!), it would certainly yield a lot of positives if we decide to reprogram our fingers into letting the other six join the crowd. It is making full use of our 'resources', and thus transforming ourselves to mean efficient machines. (oh yeah)

You don't exactly need to purchase a typing software to relearn how to work the keyboard. If you have a good internet connection, there are a lot of sites out there which only require you to register and you're good to go. Most of them I believe use a progressive scheme to help you move through mastering the home keys and so on. The site I am using is GoodTyping.So far it has helped me get the hang of asfdf and jkl;. Not too bad for someone who consistently failed to use her pinkie.:D

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