Touch typing

Your left hand rests on A, S, D and F. Your right hand rests on J, K, L and the semicolon. Both thumbs sit on the space bar. That is home position.

Find the small raised ridges on F and J with your index fingers. Every keyboard in the world has them, and they exist for exactly one reason: so you can find home position without looking. Once you can, every other key is a known distance from a known starting point.

The rule that makes it work is that fingers return home after every reach. If your hand drifts, the distances change and you have to look again.

Each finger owns a diagonal column. Getting this right at the start matters more than anything else, because retraining a wrong finger habit later is much harder than learning it correctly now.

• Left little finger: Q, A, Z and the 1 key
• Left ring finger: W, S, X and 2
• Left middle finger: E, D, C and 3
• Left index finger: R, F, V, T, G, B and 4, 5
• Right index finger: Y, H, N, U, J, M and 6, 7
• Right middle finger: I, K, comma and 8
• Right ring finger: O, L, full stop and 9
• Right little finger: P, semicolon, slash, and everything to the right

To type a capital letter, hold shift with the little finger of the hand that is not typing the letter. Capital A means right little finger on shift, left little finger on A.

Using the same hand for both forces that hand off home position for every capital. This is the single most common cause of a plateau in self-taught typists, and it is worth fixing even if everything else is already fast.

Expect to be slower for about a week. Most people reach their old hunt-and-peck speed somewhere between two and four weeks of fifteen minutes a day, and pass it clearly by six weeks.

The part people underestimate is that the ceiling is completely different. Hunt-and-peck typically tops out around 40 words per minute because your eyes have to find every key. Touch typing has no such ceiling - your hands know where things are, and your attention is free for the words themselves.