Introduction
Recently I decided that I wanted to work on increasing my typing speed and accuracy, and to try to kill off my old bad habit of looking down on my hands from time to time. I have now spent about a week working on that, going through the first courses on typing.com. I recorded my progress on each of these days, and since I have really been working hard at keeping my accuracy up, forcing myself to at least eventually get 100% accuracy on each project, it has taken me a bit to move through all of these lesson sets. At the end of the week I do feel much more confident in typing without looking at my hands at all, and I feel that I am doing so with much more accuracy. I still need to work on increasing my typing speed, but I think that if I were to factor in the time need for correction in the past, then I am already typing “more quickly” than I used to, I just get to the end of what I need to type a little slower, but then don’t need to go back to correct anything.
Daily Progress
Sunday March 24th
Today I finished the second half of the Beginner Review 1 and all of the T, S, And L Keys lessons sets, both with 100% accuracy, and explored more of the website. It took me a little while to finish the Beginner Review 1 lesson set, particularly because of one lesson which I kept getting just one thing wrong on, a different thing each time. I do think that I want to keep going with this approach, but it is difficult when I get into situations like that, and eventually I might need to let myself skip 100%ing some lessons, with the intent to come back later to get 100% accuracy on them.
Monday March 25th
Today I worked through the O, B, And A Keys and V, H, And M Keys lesson sets. The first I finished everything in with 100% accuracy, and in the second set there are two lessons near the end that I need to go back and complete with 100% accuracy. As more keys are added, the series of letters to type grow more complex, and the lessons near the end of the lesson set grow longer. The longer the lesson is the more difficult it is to mistype nothing at all, with my most frequently occurring problem being not that I type the wrong character, but that I accidentally type an extra character, such as typing three of a character when I am supposed to type it twice, or accidentally typing both a character that I am supposed to as well as one of the characters next to it, due to not centering my fingers on the keys well.
Tuesday March 26th
Today I worked through the Period And Comma and W, X, And ; Keys lessons sets, as well as half of the Q, Y, And P Keys lesson set, completing them all with 100% accuracy. I also went back and completed with 100% accuracy the two lessons which had given me trouble yesterday. I think my typing was already decent, but that I needed to spend some time on making sure that I am typing things the way I am supposed to be, and breaking the habit of glancing down at the keyboard. I am totally comfortable with all of the home row characters, those being a, s, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, ;, and ‘, and as long as I don’t let myself get sloppy I type these with the correct fingers. The top and bottom row characters directly above and below my fingers when I place them in the usual home row position have also come pretty easily to me, those being q, w, e, and r on the top for the left hand and z, x, c, and v on the bottom for the left hand, as well as u, i, o, and p on the top for the right hand and m, ,, ., and / on the bottom for the right hand. The most troubling characters at this point are ones I need to stretch my index fingers to reach, those being t and b for my left hand and y and n for my right hand, with y and b feeling the very most uncomfortable. I am going to put off taking any typing test until the weekend, and I am excited to see how I score then, I imagine it will be much better.
Conclusion
I started out the week strong, putting in at least half an hour of practice each day, as I had planned on doing. On Thursday and Friday I did not keep up with these intents, and hopefully next week I will do a better job at keeping this minimum up throughout the entire week. I feel that I am now doing a better job at typing accurately, not looking at my hands as much, even compulsively, and I am typing all the keys with the correct fingers, whereas in the past there were a few keys I tended to type in odd ways. I have used my goggles and they have been pretty helpful, and I have tried to keep good posture for much of the time I spend practicing each day. The Beginner unit I think is the largest one, and I was able to finish it in a week, so I think I will be safe setting my aim for the next two weeks to be finishing the Intermediate and Advanced courses, one each week. What I am not sure about is if I will be able to finish them in that time with 100% accuracy, but that will be the initial aim. I really look forward to seeing my test results after these weeks, and I suspect that the increase from this week to next week will be the most radical change, and that the change from next week to the week after will also be a larger change than from last week to this week, but only time will tell.