Typing Tutor - Fastest Typing Tutor Ever

I used to be one of those digitally challenged people who had to hunt and peck with two fingers around my computer keyboard. I never learned to type back in high school, because in those days the girls took typing and boys didn't. Typing isn't one of those intuitive skills that we just pick up, such as riding a bicycle or even using a mouse. When I first tried those activities, the movement seemed totally unnatural, but in a matter of a few hours, they were part of me

Why doesn't typing work that way? Blame the qwerty keyboard layout, which was implemented to slow fast typists down, rather than to make keyboarding easier or more efficient

Ten years ago, I decided it was time to learn how to type. I bought Mavis Beacon's typing tutor, which was the premier program at the time, but I never got anywhere. I recently decided to make another attempt. This time, I went to AllTheWeb and entered "typing tutor.". The first of some 100,000 references brought me to Nail It Now in Australia, where Georgie (the system's developer) offers a Web-based typing tutor for Canadian$26

This one looked worth a try as there was nothing to load on my system. Your payment gets you a password that lets you access the full manual. I printed the manual and as I went through it, I kept thinking to myself that it was just too simple to be real. Nevertheless, I had made a firm decision to stick with it for a while and set a weekend aside with the intent of increasing my skills from two to perhaps half a dozen fingers and a start at getting away from my need to keep looking at the keyboard

The first step was to assign simple expressions to the keys to make you remember them. Say it out loud. Animals in the Snow Dig for Food Greedily--asdfg. Now type it 10 times. Where do you find Animals? In the Queensland Zoo of course... your left pinkie goes up and down from the a to get the q and z. Type aqz 10 times. I went through each instruction and the follow-up exercises

Suddenly, I realized I had passed my objective in just 55 minutes. I may have made loads of mistakes and still have had plenty of practice ahead of me, but I was typing with 10 fingers and not looking at the keys. It was time to make the big decision. If I really want to succeed, everything from now on--and that means all my real work--must be done with 10 fingers and no looking at the keyboard, except maybe for numbers and passwords

Georgie's mission was to teach you how to type text. The numbers will follow as you get more proficient. Passwords are always a problem. With all those security schemes blocking the display, you can never be sure what you enter unless you look at the keys

Having made the decision to quit all my two-finger activities and switch to my newly acquired skill, I was preparing myself for at least one month of absolute hell. I work with two desktops and a notebook and each keyboard has a different feel from the others. Things didn't go as badly as anticipated, though. I didn't give up and revert to my two-finger standard. I'm still using all 10, but faster and with fewer mistakes

While I certainly consider that to be a major accomplishment, I get my ultimate satisfaction when I tell real typists about teaching myself to type, then watch their reaction when they hear I was able to use all 10 fingers within the first hour

Why did Nail It Now Typing Tutor succeed where Mavis Beacon failed? Many courses go through a series of exercises to get you to use each finger and hand correctly. You may spend half an hour each day, then go back to work. That means you are going right back to your old ways with your two fingers and are almost guaranteed to forget everything you just learned

Nail It Now Typing Tutor sends you through a set of quick exercises and that's all. There was no intent to make you perfect, just capable enough to apply what you learned to your real work by the end of the first session. There was no second session. All I needed at this stage was practice and I could use my real work for that practice. This reduced the likelihood that I would go back to my old ways

Do I have any objections? You bet I do. I learned to type the same month I qualified for the Canada Pension. I needed Georgie half a century ago

Marvin Silbert
Computer Review Editor
"Hub: Digital Living" magazine
Canada
October 9, 2002

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