Touch Typing: What It Is and How to Learn It

Touch typing is typing without looking at the keys. Each finger is assigned its own keys and returns to a home position after every press, so you find keys by feel rather than by sight ¹. The method dates from the 1890s and is the technique taught in typing classes ².

Touch typing lets you keep your eyes on the text. It does not guarantee you will type faster than someone who never learned it. In a 2016 lab study of copying text, typists without training entered text at nearly the same speed as touch typists, but they spent about twice as much of their time looking at the keyboard ³.

Touch typing means typing without looking, with every finger assigned to fixed keys

The touch typing system gives each key to one finger, and each finger has a home position in the middle row that it returns to after pressing a key ¹. Touch typists practice these finger movements so that they can enter text without having to look at the keyboard ⁴.

The simplest test is whether you look down to find a key. If you do, you are not yet touch typing, even if you use all ten fingers. We suggest learning the home row first, then the keys around it. The rest of the keyboard follows the same finger columns.

The method described here uses the QWERTY layout, which most keyboards use. Other layouts put keys in different places, so the finger map changes with them. Our comparison of keyboard layouts covers that.

Every finger starts on the home row: ASDF on the left and JKL; on the right

Rest your index fingers on F and J, then place the other fingers on the keys beside them. Keyboards usually have small raised bumps on F and J, so you can find the home position by touch without looking down. The thumbs rest on the space bar.

The home position for the left hand is A, S, D, F. For the right hand it is J, K, L and semicolon. Our question on finger placement covers the number row, the symbols and the keys that small hands find hard to reach.

Each finger owns one staggered column of keys, and the thumbs take the space bar

Because each finger owns a column, a key's position tells you which finger to use, even with your eyes closed. The columns are staggered because the rows of a keyboard are offset from one another.

Consistency matters more than the number of fingers. Motion capture of the study's typists found three habits that predict high speed: a letter is always pressed by the same finger, upcoming keystrokes are prepared in advance, and hand movement is kept small ⁵. The first of these is the one touch typing trains directly, because the same finger always goes to the same key.

Self-taught typists can match touch typists on speed, but touch typists look at the keyboard about half as long

The strongest evidence comes from a 2016 transcription study at Aalto University ⁶. Thirty people typed sentences while motion capture recorded every finger and eye-tracking glasses recorded their gaze ⁷. Of the participants, 43 percent said they had learned and used touch typing ⁸. The authors' most surprising finding was that self-taught typists could reach speeds comparable with touch typists, even when they used fewer fingers ⁶.

The speed gap was very small. Touch typists averaged 57.8 words per minute and typists without training averaged 58.93 ^{9 10}, a difference of about 1.1 words per minute ¹¹.

Finger counts were close. Typists without training used 6.2 fingers on average, against 8.5 for touch typists ^{12 13}, a gap of about 2.3 fingers ¹⁴. The authors call that surprisingly close, so finger count alone does not separate the groups. Gaze separated them more clearly. While copying text, typists without training spent 40 percent of their time looking at the keyboard, and touch typists spent 20 percent ^{15 16}.

A 2018 benchmark of 51 people typing, recorded with a webcam and eye tracker, shows what that difference looks like in the moment ¹⁷. Touch typists keep their gaze on the line of text, and they fix on the characters typed just after a key press. Non-touch typists look straight down just before the key is pressed ¹⁸.

A second lab study, from Vanderbilt University, found a larger speed gap ^{19 20}. The table compares the two studies.

The Vanderbilt study used two groups of 24 people ²¹. It found that standard typists were also more accurate, at around 94 percent against 83 percent ²². The researchers added that nonstandard typists could type almost as quickly and accurately as touch typists, provided they could see the keyboard ²³. The two studies disagree on how large the speed gap is, so the honest reading is that touch typing gives a clear advantage in some tasks and a small one in others.

Typists use many finger techniques, from one finger to several

Not everyone who skips touch typing is a pure hunt-and-peck typist. The Aalto researchers grouped each participant's finger-to-key pattern and found 4 techniques for the left hand and 6 for the right ²⁴. The techniques range from one-finger input to multi-finger input.

The study names a consistent finger-to-key mapping as a predictor of high speed ⁵, and self-taught typists reached comparable speeds with fewer fingers ²⁵. That mapping is the first of the three predictors described above, and it is also the feature that touch typing teaches on purpose. Read our question on touch typing versus hunt and peck for how the two methods compare, and see the glossary entry for hunt and peck for the term.

Expect your speed to dip before it climbs, and plan for months rather than weeks

In one published course with keystroke logging, the speed of typically achieving students fell by the end of the program, while students with learning disabilities improved somewhat ^{26 27}. Three months after the lessons ended, both groups were significantly faster than before the program ²⁸.

That course had 14 lessons held every two weeks ²⁶, which runs for about 28 weeks ²⁹. The authors of the lab study say that touch typing "can be learned rather quickly," but that it "requires deliberate training of hundreds of hours" to reach the performance rates reported in the literature ³⁰.

Put together, the evidence supports a timeline of months, not days. The studies we reviewed do not support promises of results within a few days. We did not find a peer-reviewed study that measures how long the first stage takes, so any week count you see should be treated as an estimate. Our guide to how to type faster covers what else raises speed once the basics are in place.

Short daily practice that puts accuracy first fits the evidence

Our advice is to aim for accuracy before speed. Students in the touch-typing course kept accuracy above 95 percent ³¹. A consistent finger-to-key habit is one of three predictors of speed that the motion study identified ⁵, so careful practice also builds the habit that predicts speed.

A practical routine follows from that:

1. Start with the home row keys and make sure each finger returns to its own position after every press.
2. Practice a new key only after you can type the keys you already know without looking down.
3. Type slowly and accurately, and correct errors as you go. Do not hide a mistake by looking at the keyboard.
4. Keep the keyboard covered or look only at the screen, so that you learn the position of each key rather than its appearance.
5. Practice regularly. The studies do not test session length, so the length of each session is practical advice, not a finding.

Tools that track typing accuracy and words per minute can show you progress. Our question on the best free way to learn compares what to look for.

Learn the keys in four stages, one row at a time

The route we recommend is to add one row of keys at a time, and to move on only when each key comes without a look.

1. Home row: learn A, S, D, F and J, K, L, semicolon, with each finger resting on its home key and the thumbs on the space bar.
2. Top and bottom rows: learn the letters above and below the home row. Each finger moves up or down from its home key to reach them, and stays in its column.
3. Number row and punctuation: learn the digits and common symbols. We expect this stage to be the slowest, because the fingers must reach further from the home row.
4. Speed: once every key comes without a look, practice on whole words and sentences. Raise speed only after accuracy is steady.

The stages follow the finger columns, so a finger that learns its home key first already knows where its other keys sit.

Five habits work against the speed that touch typing gives you

Five habits undo the benefits of touch typing. Each one runs against the predictors of high speed ⁵, or against the gaze pattern of touch typists ¹⁸.

Measure progress with words per minute counted the same way every time

Typing speed is only comparable when the counting rule stays the same. The Aalto test defines one word as five characters, spaces included ³². Tests that count real words give slightly different numbers, so use one test consistently when you track progress.

Pair speed with accuracy. A fast score with many errors is not progress. Our guide to how typing speed is measured explains the difference between gross and net speed, and typing accuracy defines the second number you should track.

Elementary pupils gained speed in both keyboarding programs, but the best starting age is unknown

Children can learn touch typing, but the research we found does not say when to start. A 2021 study followed elementary pupils for two school years ³³. One group used the structured program, Keyboarding Without Tears, in both years, and it had 592 participants ³³. Both groups improved in speed and accuracy, and the structured program gave stronger gains in second, third and fourth grade ³⁴.

That study compared two specific programs. It did not test teacher-led lessons against each other, and it did not identify a best starting age. Our question on the right age for children explains what the evidence does and does not support.

Dictation is faster for short messages, but touch typing still matters for editing and code

Speech can beat the keyboard for entering text. In a 2018 lab study of short messages on an iPhone, English speech reached 153 words per minute, against 52 on the built-in keyboard ^{35 36}. The authors say that results outside the laboratory still need study ³⁷, and that upper-bound speech recognition performance has greatly improved compared with earlier systems ³⁸.

Speed is not the whole picture. Dictation suits drafting; touch typing still suits precise edits, symbols and code, where you need to move the cursor and correct characters quickly. That is our judgment, not a finding of the studies. Our comparison of dictation and typing covers when each one wins, and how to dictate explains how to get clean text from speech.

Touch typing is worth learning if you type all day and want your eyes on the screen

Touch typing is a set of fixed finger-to-key habits, practiced until they run without thought. Its clearest benefit is that you can keep your attention on the text rather than the keys. Its speed benefit is smaller than you might expect: in the Aalto study, people without training were nearly as fast ¹¹, and they still looked at the keyboard about twice as long ³.

The method takes months to master, so it pays most to people who type for hours each day. That is our judgment from the timeline, not a finding of the studies. If you already type quickly with a few fingers, the Aalto results suggest you may gain little speed by switching, although the Vanderbilt study found a larger gap ^{19 20}. Our question on whether touch typing is worth learning takes up that choice in more detail, and our question on touch typing versus hunt and peck compares the two methods directly.

For more on the topic, read our guide to typing speed research, our guide to how typing speed is measured, and our overview of typing ergonomics. The full subject is covered in our overview of typing speed.