What is Hunting and Pecking?

“Hunting and pecking” is how most people type, by pressing one letter before raising a finger into the air and moving on until the next one.

There are a number of problems with this. By having to seek out each key your brain has more to process, which slows you down. Using two fingers instead isn’t much help ether as the positioning isn’t quite right. This could mean that you make around 30% more mistakes – the equivalent to roughly one word out of three.

There’s also the risk of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). Between your joints is a connective tissue known as cartilage. As these joints move the cartilage wears out. But just using one or two fingers, your cartilage is placed under much more strain for a longer time. Instead, it’s much better to share out the workload.

This is what touch typing is for. By learning to touch type, you speed up your typing by using all your fingers, finding your way about the keyboard by memory instead of having to look at the keyboard to see where every letter is.