One of the best things I came out of Covid with was better, faster typing. In the middle of all the brouhaha with the lockdown and panic, I did two things as we stayed locked up at home- I learnt about crypto and I embarked on a typing journey. The latter is what I’ll be talking about in this post.
I honestly don’t remember why I decided to do it, but I’m glad today that I did, whatever the reasons might’ve been.
I try to get myself as diversely equipped as possible, so good typing skills at the time just seemed like a good investment to make in myself rather than waste the entire lockdown binging shows.
Before I started this learning, I was an “A woh3 B woh3n?” type typist. This is translated from Twi, a local Ghanaian language and means “Where’s A and where is B?”. It basically is used to describe slow typists who have to keep looking for every key they want to enter.
The surprising thing is, there are a lot of people around here who are like that. You could almost count me as one of the said slow typists because even though, I didn’t have to look at the keyboard for every key, I had to look for most of them and I was typing with just two fingers too. Lol
Like I said, for whatever reason, I decided to school myself and change my typing story. I didn’t know many tools to start my journey with. But there’s always Mavis Beacon and that was what cushioned me in my time of need.
I downloaded and installed Mavis and I made it compulsory to enter mavis and practice almost everyday. It wasn’t easy. It was the first real commitment I forced myself to honor everyday. I did it even on days I didn’t feel like doing it, because I understood what my goal was.
Even though I already knew the positions of most keys blind-folded, I started my typing journey from scratch. I learnt the key designations for our fingers using the QWERTY keyboard and forced myself to not fall back to my old typing pattern.
My progress was reeallyyy slow at first. Almost like I was stagnated at my starting point for the first week. I almost lost motivation to keep going but after the first week, I started to see little improvements. Even though my typing was still slow, I realized my fingers were now subconsciously and spontaneously be able to type 5 keys without a hinderance.
The following week, I threw in a little something to incentivize me to keep going. But when I say incentivize, it wasn’t monetary in this case. I like games, so I figured a way to get me to like my new skill would be to integrate it with something I liked. So I did just that.
I started playing the Mavis Beacon Typing Games. Now I see those games to be really childish and corny but I didn’t back then though, because I wasn’t as good as I am now.
The games helped a lot. It turned the work in learning how to type into fun. I played this ants with alphabet leaves on their head game. Lol I don’t remember what it was called. Then another one with an airplane flying above the sea, held in the sky by your ability to type accurately and fast. It started sinking every time you miss a letter, and would almost be completely submerged under sea if you miss a couple of words.
In a few months time, I was significantly better than I was when I started. This was when I started really thanking myself for not giving up. At this point, I entirely stopped having to check the keyboard for keys. Except numbers. I still struggle with typing numbers without looking even today. But hey, at least I’m not an amateur anymore, right?
When I went to final year University last year, I realized I did myself a great service when we started our final year project. For the final year project, which is several pages worth of typing, you’ll need to he really conversant with your keyboard, especially if you’re someone like me who postpones stuff until the deadline and have to be as fast as possible.
If you’re a final year student that doesn’t know how to type, I suggest you start learning now. It’s not too late, still. Maybe a few minutes of practice everyday and by the time you start writing your project, you’ll be good.
Even before my final year project, Hive happened and writing frequently improved my typing tremendously. And it wasn’t just my typing Hive improved. My writing, research skills and originality were all improved. I learn how to properly source articles in my research and create original content(articles) here.
So by the time we started final year, I didn’t have any problems when it comes to typing. I’ve been the typist many times for my group in class group discussions and presentations because of how fast I type. It gave me a sense of accomplishment knowing that I put in serious work to get there.
Human nature calls for continuous evolution and improvement. Even in the things we already consider ourselves good at. You can always get better.
In the case of typing, I still lack when it comes to typing numbers and a bit with punctuations too. When I was learning to type in 2021, my focus was mainly on the alphabets and a few important punctuations I thought were important at the time. I realize now that I was wrong.
I plan to take some more typing lessons, this time online with access to more and better tools. Due to the nature of my work right now, I don’t have much time to spare for typing like I used to. I barely have time to be on Hive itself. Hell I don’t remember the last time I got up to 7 hours of sleep!
All the same, if my workload reduces anytime soon, I plan to add punctuations and numbers to my new typing target. I’m a moderate typist until it comes to numbers and complex punctuation.
I’m not sure the exact mark I’m at with my Average Word Per Minute, but it’s pretty okay for me. For now, I type as fast as I want when it’s an all alphabet
article. I’m not at that big pro level yet, but I sure as hell am not an amateur anymore. So I guess you could call me a pro and an amateur at the same thing here.
