Jashe\'s Comprehensive (Speed)Typing Guide PDF

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Improve your typing speed like a boss...

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Jashe’s Comprehensive (Speed)Typing Guide dedicated to Luise, Young, Leona, Delf, Lenke and every typist who wants to improve

STRAWPOLLS AT THE END OF MANY CHAPTERS!

typing /ˈtʌɪpɪŋ/ noun 1. the action or skill of writing something by means of a typewriter or computer.

Hello fellow and aspiring typists! � Over the years I have spent among my beloved typing community so far, I have noticed that while there’s plenty of sources for typing advice available for plenty of people who have sought it, they oftentimes only focus on a few certain aspects of typing as they tend to be pretty short and easy to read, and now and then the suggestions would contradict each other. I thought I would try to concentrate the advice while adding a lot of original thoughts from yours truly and shine some light on it from different perspectives, especially my own. And if I can successfully do that, who knows, maybe this will turn into a go-to place when looking for a more well-rounded typing encyclopedia directed at typists of all levels who want to improve their “real” and also website typing skills? � If you’re looking for a short, straightforward guide, this is not quite the right place, though keeping to the bold text and focusing on the topics that interest you in the content guide (or only looking at the contentc ontent guide for a VERY basic version) will be the easiest method in that case. While it certainly only covers part of my guide’s content, I think John’s - a dear friend of mine and the fastest Dvorak typist - typing guide is very well written and instructive How to Become a Faster Typist Anyway, I hope you enjoy this long read of over 142 pages! __________________________________________________________________

Abbreviations & Terms 1

First off, let me explain some of my formatting principles: ‘ ’ is for indicating words, letters, or names; “ ” is used as a usual quotation mark and mostly to indicate exaggerations; bold is for the especially important parts; CAPS puts emphasis on a word, cursive is for fictive audience questions or for more meta remarks that are not necessarily supposed to be coherent with the guide’s content; red text either means that there’s a construction site which I will have to edit again in the future or that the information is variable/updatable; the color blue addresses stuff that is not related to typing, and are mostly quick jabs at problems; the background colors green and red talk about the pros and cons of something; and underline serves to structure my guide into different chapters and subchapters. ( ) means that I probably overcomplicated a sentence again and couldn’t help but add some additional info...

Touch-Typing Typing without using your eyes to find the keys: Through muscle memory, your fingers just know where to go. Traditionally, this is done by ascending from a hunt-and-peck typist to a touch typist using home row (which is explained in Tips & Tricks).

Hunt-and-Peck A common, but bad and amateurish way of typing where one keeps looking at the keyboard due to not knowing where the keys are, and usually types with both index fingers. Very inefficient and slow.

WPM/CPM Words Per Minute/Characters Per Minute: The number of words and keystrokes typed in 60 seconds. Usually, a word represents 5 keystrokes, so that 100 WPM = 500 CPM. 5 characters per word is the general consensus, and is how most sites calculate WPM. However, the actual average length for a random word in the English Language is 4.8 characters. 5 characters per word is the general consensus but it is, in fact, not quite correct. To my analysis, 6 characters per word (including space) is the closest integeraverage. "Usually" referring to it being used on sites is correct, but it is not the "usual" length of words.

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Accuracy (Percentage of) how many keystrokes out of all are actually correct. Perfect 100% accuracy means typing a text flawlessly without errors, 0% percent accuracy means typing everything/all words wrong. Typing sites use various methods to measure one’s accuracy, but universally, the higher your accuracy, the better.

Consistency Related to accuracy, Consistency describes how well your scores keep up over a period of time or a multitude of texts. The more consistent you are, the more similar your WPM scores and the less deviation there will be, which means you don’t get many bad scores, but don’t reach extraordinarily high WPMs either.

Raw Speed To put it simply, how fast anyone inputs the keystrokes or how fast someone is capable of typing, not taking into account the ‘accuracy’ factor. Alternatively, it can mean the total amount of keystrokes typed, not caring if they were correct or not.

one of shazzy’s Advanced English scores, set on 17th May 2020 Here the raw speed is 974 keystrokes which is 194,8 WPM, but because he typed 27 keystrokes wrong (5,4 WPM) his result is 189,4 WPM.

Burst Speed Related to Raw Speed, Burst Speed usually refers to a typist’s ability to type a short and easy text as fast as possible. It is a contest of pure finger speed rather than how accurate or consistently well you can type or how good you're at difficult words. 3

Non-Quit Common term typically used for sites such as TypeRacer and Nitro Type where a typist doesn’t abandon (bad) races in order to achieve a higher average and avoid difficult texts, but finishes every race. Nonquit accounts are supposed to display a typist’s real average skill in WPM across a number of different texts.

Real Typing I use this term to describe forms of typing that have some sort of real practical purpose and value in real life, be it texting & chatting, writing an essay, leaving comments on forums, googling stuff etc. Usually, you will need a grasp of the whole keyboard to excel at real typing, as symbols and punctuation are quite prevalent, and you want to avoid making errors/typos. This guide is supposed to cover real typing, but it’s also supposed to help the aspiring competitive typist. Both can overlap, for example in the Intersteno Congress you have to type advanced, coherent texts. I also use this system to indicate fingerings:

“Ok, but... hold on” you may think, “who is this guy and why does he think he can help me at all? Is he gonna force me to learn Dvorak and practice 40 hours a day?” Now, that’s a fair question! 4

Firstly, I’d just like to clarify that I don’t intend to enforce anything on anybody; this is after all a GUIDE and not the Ten Commandments. You have a lot of freedom and ways to approach typing improvement, which is something you’ll probably strongly notice throughout this guide. Also, this document has been created with the help and feedback of other typists - thanks a lot! Especially to xsession/concurrent, who collected tips from 30 different good typists and allowed me to look into them - and while I can only share my knowledge and do like to express my own views, I’ll try to clearly announce them as my own too. “Ok nice, but just WHO are you?” Well, glad you asked! __________________________________________________________________

A Little About Me My name is Jakob Sheng-Jie Poon and I currently study English and Spanish. (Jashe is the name I go by; it’s pronounced without the “e” in English phonology, so like “dash” but with a “j” at the beginning. The pronunciation varies from language to language though, it’s unique in Spanish and in German, and Chinese/Taiwanese people call me by my Chinese name anyway). Born to parents from Taiwan Northern Germany

and Vietnam

, I have been living all my life in

since 2000 and have been typing for as long as I can remember.

While I proudly exercise a variety of hobbies such as computer gaming , piano (both probably being potent catalysts of my typing speed and finger agility, + I had almost 10 000 posts in a forum of a game called Awesomenauts), singing language learning, over the last few years typing

, chess

, and

has become my strongest pastime.

I used to type with a handful of fingers some years back, but eventually adopted a standard home row method that used 9 fingers, and some months ago switched to a personalized 10-Finger-System, whereby I (among other things) included my right thumb to type the letters ‘m’,’n’ and sometimes ‘b’, while my left thumb has always been confined to the spacebar. I have mained QWERTY for basically all my typing journey, but learned Dvorak and Colemak in the years 2017 and 2018 and have kept them relatively fresh since then. As of July 2020, having reached all my concrete typing goals, I started to main Colemak 5

(averaging 120 on typeracer and 170 on 10FF, and as of 27th July 130 and 180) and intend to reach 200 WPM, we’ll see where and with which Colemak optimization I end up :) Edit on 31st July 2020: I did 205 WPM, a 10 WPM jump from 195 � As can be seen on my 10fastfingers Profile, where I started my typing journey, I reached a Personal Best of 221 WPM in the English Normal Mode on 13th May 2020, beating Sean Wrona’s flawless 220 WPM run and former world record and taking the Top 6 Verified Highscore of All Time at that time. I also scored 182 WPM in the Advanced Mode a few days later, and had taken Top 2 on a custom 10 minute test with 194 WPM weeks earlier. Later on I also achieved 181 WPM on the monkey-type 1 hour basic test, becoming the world record holder for now (covered here) While I’m not the fastest - though I was featured in a Top 10 Fastest Typists In The World video - or let alone the most accurate typist, I’m especially proud of my diverse skill set and am kind of known for my (English) skills in the other layouts Dvorak and Colemak and also in different languages, being a rather fast multilingual typist - averaging almost 140 WPM across 34 languages - and holding the world records in Swedish, Esperanto and German. German is by far the fastest second language with a personal best of 209 WPM, the 21st fastest verified score of all-time in all languages. Furthermore, I boast some high scores on sites such as typera.net, dominate the TypeRacer German Universe and regularly reach nonquit averages of 170+ in the English universe. I race on Nitrotype now and then. I also upload videos to my Youtube Channel and occasionally stream on Twitch (subscribe and leave a follow if you like �). I type on an Apple Magic Keyboard or use my laptop. Because of my years of experience with different layouts and websites and languages, I think I am quite qualified to talk about typing in general and am happy to share the knowledge that I have.

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I have an unhealthy hunger for roles. They are my ego’s life source ____________________________________________________________________

The Essentials (aside from a functioning PC, a keyboard, an internet connection, and preferably short nails. Yeah, typing is pretty simple and cheap.)

Now, before you start any typing practice, the one thing I think you should place above everything else, even fun and your typing improvement, is your mental and physical health. Therefore, I strongly encourage you to develop a typing practice routine that works for you. Here’s my tips, which extend far beyond just typing but more so apply to activities and your life in general:

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1.0 Track the time you spend on every website. This helps you to know where your time goes and allows you to consciously invest your precious time; for example, you could decide to do 30 minutes of typingclub.com, 20 minutes of TypeRacer, and 10 minutes of 10fastfingers every practice session, splitting it into smaller sessions. The simple way of doing this is looking at the clock, perhaps setting an alarm, and switching when the designated time has come. I have used RescueTime for years and it’s helped me a lot to realize how I spend my time. If you get addicted to stuff & activities easily or, like me, suffer from a lack of self-control, do consider installing extensions that limit your time you can spend on certain sites or that just block them entirely when you just don’t have time to practice typing: 8 Website Blockers For Studying, Productivity, & Focus | Freedom Matters I have used BlockSite on Google Chrome to block chess, typing and communication sites during weeks where I focused on studying, and it’s worked wonderfully.

1.1 Practice regularly And by regularly, I mean preferably “daily”. As someone with a few different hobbies, one of the most important lessons I have ever learned is that consistently and patiently exercising an activity for a bit every day is a rather slow, but very effective and sure way to improve at anything. Doing typing for 1 hour each day over a week is way more effective than doing a 7-hour session (which is actually discouraged as it’s over-practicing, unhealthy and arguably a waste of time): Not only is it way less exhausting for your brain and body, it also allows you to build up muscle memory over the period of one whole week without actually investing more time. Of course, busy schedules are ubiquitous and you won’t always be able to attend to a desired activity every day. But, even just 15, 20 or 30 minutes of diligent conscious practice every day - on top of the typing that you do anyway whenever you use a keyboard - helps a lot, and it really adds up over time. While you practice, make sure to take regular breaks. This is especially important if you do practice sessions that can last for hours, in which case I think taking a break every 30 8

minutes is sensible. Get up, stretch, walk around, get some fresh air, drink some water, eat some food… it’s basic knowledge, but easily forgotten during hectic everyday life. Also, give your fingers some rest. I have often set new Personal Bests when coming back to my laptop fresh and relaxed, after having tired out my fingers, hands and wrists and getting frustrated from my futile attempts of achieving any satisfactory result. And let me be clear about this: without any practice, you will hardly get anywhere. Sometimes you will “magically” improve without having practiced whatsoever, but still almost all of your progress, namely muscle memory, better motor skills and finger dexterity, will stem from practice. There’s no hidden secret or magical boost that can suddenly turn you into a proficient typist, or I would know by now. No guide or teacher or talent can replace practice, you will still have to put in work. The purpose of this guide is to tell you how to approach the way you practice, you could even say “art of typing”, and give you helpful tips. Now be warned: everyone is different and thus there is no universal way that works perfectly for all, and I often offer a variety of different options and encourage you to try out things for yourself. However, there are still some principles that you should follow.

1.2 Make sure you have good posture. This is one piece of advice you will find in any typing guide, and for a reason: Having good posture while you type is really damn important! You want to be kind to your back, shoulders, eyes, and wrists (the wrists and the left thumb, my spacebar thumb, tend to hurt the most after a long day full of practice during which I ignore basically every essential tip I just listed). Make sure you are treating yourself right. I think the folks over at https://www.ratatype.com/learn/ have got it right:

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And make sure you can type comfortably on your keyboard with as little strain and effort as possible Now, having good posture is not mandatory for setting high scores. Sean Wrona, widely considered the best typist, has shown notoriously bad posture by slouching while typing, and other top typists have achieved very high scores while lying in bed. But I think it’s extremely important if you don’t want to damage, but maintain your healthy body; and I have found that having my feet flat on the ground and my back straight yields better scores. I always lay my wrists on my laptop while typing, but some people type faster when they have their wrists elevated, so try it out yourself and see what feels best!

1.3 Join the typing community on Discord Admittedly, this is not really essential, but it’s nevertheless a very easy and hugely rewarding step to take. Joining the typing communities allows you to get to know other typists and chat about literally anything with them, in many different languages no less. Our community is full of amazing people - primarily young male computer enthusiasts who will gladly help people who seek advice. You can become known in the community yourself, you get to hang out with almost all the best typists, (the most dedicated typists also tend to be quite active in the community), you can join fun voice chat rooms, and on top of all that, you also improve your typing skills just by chatting! ;) There’s definitely some immature, annoying and toxic people present, but the majority of typists whom I have gotten to know are really a decent bunch and I have had great memories during my time there. You can absolutely make great friends, and if you find YOUR community, they just might become sort of your “extended family”! 10

Make sure you don’t “waste” too much time on Discord (as there’s no definite stop and you can keep on chatting for hours and hours and easily waste your whole day this way); enjoy your stay there � Links to the Discord servers of several typing websites can be found, among other things, here.

Some typing servers __________________________________________________________________

Psychology 2.0 Know what role ‘typing’ plays for you. Just how important is typing for you? Probably important enough that you’d bother to read a guide about it, well, that’s fair. But why are you interested, what are you trying to improve? Are you new to typing and looking for basic guidance, or are you a veteran looking for some advanced tips? Where you are coming from and what your (next) goals are, are crucial factors which 11

should determine how often/regularly/long you practice typing, and what you practice. If you’re an author who writes fantasy novels, you probably want to become quicker at writing down your notes & your brainstorming sessions, and you want to be able to write proper sentences with a broad vocabulary (same thing if you like writing guides, heh �). If you mainly chat online, proper punctuation and a formal style becomes less important. If you’re a hardcore gamer, you may even want to adapt a typing style that doesn’t deviate strongly from the usual WASD left hand position (whether that’s a good idea is another question). If you’re a programmer, being able to type symbols, numbers and special characters fast becomes paramount. If you’re a language enthusiast, most likely your typing skills will cover a variety of languages instead of just one. But usually, you will just focus on getting better in one (main) language. If you’re interested in QWERTY and alternative keyboard layouts, chances are you’ll install some alteration of Qwerty, Colemak or Dvorak or some other popular layout too. If you’re just doing this for fun, you don’t have to take typing as seriously as say a medical transcriptionist who does typing professionally. These roles may overlap, are prone to change and don’t have to matter a lot; after all, most people just want to improve their general typing abilities, the importance of typing can keep changing over time, and everybody has to be able to communicate in various registers. But it’s still good to know and be conscious of what typing skills you want to acquire and how much you are willing to practice for it. Practice what you need typing for. I would say that typing fast can be a pretty useful skill and everyone should at least be able to touch-type, but if you’re already able to consistently reach triple digit WPM speeds, you’re probably better off working on certain hard or soft skills instead. Many people may view typing as a chore and avoid doing it as well as...