At first glance you may be right, however I have three questions:-

1. If you run a company and had 8 employees and then only got 2 or 3 or 4 of them to work, whilst the others did nothing, would you say that you were a good at running your business?

The answer is obvious- of course not. To fully maximise your business you would want to make sure every employee was working for you.

Now let’s apply this to the fingers you use when touch typing. You have eight fingers and if you are a teen that hasn’t to learn how to touch type properly, you will be using 1, 2 3 or 4 fingers with the occasional 5th one thrown in. This doesn’t make sense, if you get all your fingers to work, then it stands to reason you will type more efficiently and faster – you know I’m right!

2. Do you look at the keyboard when you type?

What a waste of brain power! Your eyes have to focus on the keys and your brain has to process this information, instead of focusing on the content you want to produce. By not looking at the keyboard we have proved that you can increase your speed by a minimum, MINIMUM, of 20%, so for every hour of typing you save 12 minutes to do other things. If you haven’t started your GCSE’s this may not seem that important to you, but when you start having to produce coursework for your GCSE’s, A Level’s and Dissertations at University, when you are spending days producing content, I promise you that 20% will be a welcome bonus.

3. For every paragraph you type how many times you do you press the backspace key?

If you are a hunt and peck typist, then the likelihood is that you give the appearance of typing really fast, but are making a large percentage of mistakes. Type out a paragraph and see how many times you have to press backspace.

Stop and think about how much time you spend, daily, typing! Learning how to touch type correctly will not only make you more efficient and faster, leaving you more time to do other things including chatting online, but it will also reduce the risk of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) – Google them to see how painful these could be if you don’t spread the work load.