How Quickly Could You Type This Sentence?

Spending time with an online learn-to-type option will improve your relationship with your keyboard and your attitude toward typing.
By Jonathan Blum ,

Fellow business owners, it's time to learn to type. Not hunt, peck, scramble, cheat or slouch. No slamming. No pounding. No stealing looks at the keyboard. I'm talking honest to goodness, 10 fingers, back straight, arms at your side typing.

Why? Because typing is among the simplest and most effective means of boosting the efficiency of your work life, says Kip Gregory, a Washington. D.C.- based business consultant and author of

Winning Clients in a Wired World

. If you can't type, Gregory says, learn. If you can type, learn to type faster and more accurately.

Take me, a poster child for bad typing. I type about 25 words per minute net of errors. Disgraceful, but true. I figure I type about four hours a day, or 20 hours per week. If I could double that to 50 words per minute -- which is absolutely possible given modern keyboards and techniques -- I could get my work done in about two hours less per day, or about half the time. That gets my attention.

The news here is that -- along with other small business functions like word processing, project management and customer relationship management -- the process of learning to type has moved onto the Web. Online learn-to-type options not only are prevalent, powerful and easy to use, but many of them are free. And some -- yes, I know this sounds borderline nuts -- are actually sort of fun.

I have been testing several options over the past few months, and have found them to be a relatively easy way to improve my workplace typing with just a few minutes of practice a few times a week.

The options are vast:

Basic, free services like

typeonline.co.uk

are essentially a series of simple Web pages with key exercises and the like.

Learn2Type.com

offers a free program that specializes in not only typing instruction for normal keyboards, but also alternative layouts like the Dvorak keyboard and others.

Typing Pal Online

offers a full online course with tutorials and some nice drills for $9.95 per month, $34.95 for a six-month course.

The video game set might like

FreeTypingGame.net

. Don't let the retro Space Invaders vibe fool you, this game offers powerful drills that help you learn your Xs from your question marks.

Sites aimed strictly at professionals, such as

TypingMaster for Business

, offer programs that live behind the firewall of a company intranet. Keyboard-intensive companies like data entry and customer service should find these attractive. (Five licenses for $599.)

Typing tutor services like

TypingWeb

offer a series of free-to-start testing and certification programs. TypingWeb even has a nice feature for learning to type on your iPhone.

My favorite, at least in terms of drill quality and overall goofiness, was

Dance Mat Typing

. This free typing game, essentially for children, was produced by the BBC -- yes, the British Broadcasting Company.

It offers manageable lessons and good drills, and starts off with a simply ridiculous music and animation track that includes singing farm animals. But out of all the programs I tried, there is no question these drills are the easiest to slog through. The lessons are well structured. And they give even the worst typists -- like me -- a good, solid grounding in the right way to hold your fingers and strike a key.

Pros and Cons

In the end, did I gain massive amounts of efficiency during my testing? Not exactly. It turns out that though I use a keyboard four hours a day, I really don't type that much. I spend way too much time messing with this software or that gadget to gain hours upon hours a day in productivity just through better typing. But I clearly saw that I

would have

gained a lot if I did type all day.

And I feel very comfortable recommending that if you or your employees spend real time typing real text, I would certainly consider formal typing training, even to the point of measuring keyboard skill, and factoring the results into performance evaluations. It is obviously dumb to pay somebody day in and day out to be a slow typist.

But even beyond quantifiable results, I did find the training made me more comfortable on the keyboard. My posture was better. And I was more relaxed when it came to turning the noise that is the idea in my head into clean type that is the story on the page. I found that even 10 minutes a day of practice improved my attitude with the keyboard, my approach to my day and my work.

And I think you will find the same.

Jonathan Blum is an independent technology writer and analyst living in Westchester, N.Y. He has written for The Associated Press and Popular Science and appeared on FoxNews and The WB.

Loading ...