Ten Fast Fingers? More Like Five

The Constituents of Typing

I remember vividly getting my first laptop, which was a 13-inch MacBook Pro at the age of 10, and I was mesmerised by the technology, software, and all of the possibility that it unlocked

...so much so that I managed to go from 0 to 100 words per minute (WPM) by the age of 11. Whilst I do not consider myself as a competitive typist as I was, after all, a 2-finger typist, 10fastfingers says otherwise. In fact, their statistics indicate that a speed of over 100 WPM roughly puts you in the top 5% of typists, and 40 WPM being the median typing speed. Over a decade later, though, not much has changed, I have managed to muster up a respectable average typing speed of 120 WPM through instinctively leveraging a few more fingers [1]. 

Although age is often correlated with typing speed, this causation is a complete myth. Everyone can learn to type at higher rates, wholly attributed to muscle memory. What baffles me is the little effort we tend to put into improving this speed, which can easily be achieved with relative ease. Most typists, including children, still continue to use the hunt-and-peck typing method (having to look at the keyboard).

The Touch Type Process

Let us say that you are not in the hunt-and-peck boat and are actively trying to touch type. Over the years, I have noted several systematic patterns in this process. For the average Joe, I have identified there to be five key stages:

Stage 1: Testing Grounds

Every Joe begins with the typing that we are all familiar with- two fingers, or, dare I say, the dreaded one pointer finger. At this stage, Joe still needs to look at the keyboard for his next target.

Stage 2: Junior Winger

Joe has now familiarised himself with the keyboard and is able to guess where the key is. In other words, he has developed muscle memory that allows him to type the correct keys without looking at the keyboard, albeit slowly. However, punctuation still poses requires the occasional look.

Stage 3: Fast Gains

It has been a while since Joe had learned the keys; now, almost all characters are engrained in Joe's muscle memory. He has also improved significantly in his typing speed compared to where he started. The key difference now is that Joe uses a process referred to as rollover typing in which Joe has habitually started incorporating more fingers into the mix, not by any specific rule, simply intuition as to which finger is easiest to reach the following key.

Stage 4: Grief and Regret

What is a story without sorrow? Joe is trying increasingly harder yet keeps getting frustrated when his speed will not budge. In an attempt to inflate his speed, he may even try to type more freely and fix more mistakes (which I am guilty of myself), but this simply does not work. He now thinks of switching over to other systems, such as the ten-finger method, where most of us two-finger typists are operating.

Stage 5: Aspiring 10 Fingers

*Visible confusion*

Where are the ten fingers?

You may now be confused. Does stage 5 have a typo? No, so then, does Joe hit the 10-finger typing stage? The answer is again, no. No, he does not.

To better understand this problem, we must identify why we are here in the first place. You see, it would not be much of a problem if you began learning the ten-finger system from the start because then we would not be here. What is unfortunate is that in many cases, it is no fault of Joe but rather his circumstances. What I have noticed is that the same academic institutions and businesses that promote technological advancements as a means of increasing productivity are the same ones providing Joe with tablets and iPads. I am not saying that tablets and iPads are inherently wrong, as they have their place; however, it is often painted to be the one-size-fits-all solution when, frankly, it is unoptimised for the main task at hand- typing. This is also not to say that you cannot be a fast typer on these touchscreen devices, but instead that this is setting you up for hitting a reduced performance ceiling.

We do not tend to see this as an issue as we have the 'eventually we will get it' mindset. However, this is one of the main culprits, the premise of this assumption is wrong. Once we hit stage 4, we feel that we should naturally be able to go from a handful of fingers to the ten-finger method, failing to understand that there lies a key difference in the methodology adopted. That, using simple intuition of the keys and hitting keyboards with fingers on an ad-hoc basis is not the principle used in 10-finger typing, which has very rigid definitions of what keys can be hit with each finger. So to summarise, no, going from stage 4 to stage 5 is not simply a matter of natural progression but rather a journey of resetting to square one.

So, the better question to ask would be, now that you have identified which stage you lie in (and assuming you have not already learned ten-finger typing), whether you should ditch your current method, including your developed muscle memory, to start from scratch to learn the new ten-finger system? The answer, contrary to popular belief, is probably not.

Why typing with ten fingers is probably not worth it.

Now, there is no denying that the ten-finger method would undoubtedly produce the best results because more fingers reduce key-press delay as well as being a more comfortable hand/finger position for writing for long periods. The whole deal with the ten-finger method is that it is the formally correct way to type on a QWERTY keyboard layout. From a performance perspective, it makes sense to want to learn this typing method as it would give you an edge over your two-finger typing counterparts. However, considering my experience and many others prove, you do not need to learn the ten-finger method to have a good typing speed. Nevertheless, this is the typing method that typing teachers swear by and will teach you. It is also the typing method used in typing competitions. Unless you aspire to fall into those categories, there are more reasons why switching over might not be the best idea.

Decreased Productivity

If you take a moment to consider the years of typing you have done to train your muscle memory to type at your current speed, and that learning the ten-finger system is intrinsically more complex, then it is only rational to presume that it would take longer to get you on the same page. This means that switching over would be counterintuitive to your goals of increasing typing speed for the sake of ;typing correctly; using the ten-finger method. This will last for quite a while as you are now spending more time looking at the keyboard to ensure that you are hitting the right keys without your muscle memory (which is not only hard to train but even harder to undo the years of typing you have done with your prior method). When trying it for myself, about two months of learning the ten-finger method only got me to a speed of roughly 60 WPM, coming from 110 WPM with my prior two-finger method.

Casual Typer

For the average Joe, his workflow does not demand a continuous typing flow. When we consider the things we do with our computers, our typing is often split into short bursts and not extended periods of continuous writing. Likewise, we do not always have our fingers in typing position on the keyboard at all times. A notable point to consider is that getting your fingers ready to type using two-fingers is significantly faster than setting yourself up aligned to the ten-finger method. Although not a big deal once or twice, considering the hundreds of times we lift our fingers off the keyboard might make us rethink whether, in the end, it would still be worth it.

Technological Revolution

There used to be a time when typing would demand bulky typewriters or heavy keyboards. Nowadays, businesses are developing innovative solutions to reduce the friction between our thoughts and the screen. A prominent example would be text-to-speech (TTS), which is becoming increasingly popular and accurate. These systems can allow for typing speeds upwards of 120-160 WPM that can topple even the most passionate of typists.

Similarly, several years ago, I stumbled across a promising text prediction software called Lightkey, that mimics what phone keyboard predictions do, but at a grander scale with longer phrase predictions using artificial intelligence. This is exciting because it gives us a glimpse into the future of typing, where typing won't be entirely manual, but assistive using such predictive technologies. Whilst this may not be in its complete form yet, more recently, leading organisations such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are taking an interest in this field with their web services. It is only a matter of time before they are ready for most use cases. With the advent of such technologies, learning to type using ten fingers may no longer seem as appealing.

Fast-forward today, we are seeing this emergence of predictive generative AI in productivity tools such as a Google Workspace, Apple MacOS, developer tools like Github Copilot, Cursor IDE, and even brainful.one has made this transition.

Summary

Resources

• [1] 10fastfingers can be found here.
• [2] Lightkey text-prediction software can be found here.
• [3] My preferred typing speed test can be found here.