Increase Your Typing Speed and Accuracy

Why Typing Speed is necessary?

The most important requirement of a medical transcriptionist is good keyboarding speed and accuracy. The most effective method for keyboarding is called as “touch” typing. With touch typing, hands will be placed on the keyboard with fingers in particular formation. The position of every key on keyboard is typed and memorized which occurs fluidly without a necessity to look at keyboard continuously.

Standardizing keyboards:

Typing keyboards used by medical transcriptionists should be standardized in order to organize the keys for getting maximum efficiency. Since there are schools of thought which insist that there are many way to organize a keyboard. The schools of thought of have not existed and the present keyboard arrangement which is seen in many keyboards is one variation and another has become a common standard at present. The QWERTY keyboards are used most commonly in American and Asian countries.

Standardization took place for a major reason. We should think about wide amount of information which is present in libraries, books and internet. All the information should be typed by medical transcriptionists with excellent keyboard skills and accuracy. Standard computer keyboards have provided a mechanization of the process of typing which has resulted in incredible increase in keyboarding speed and accuracy. 

Touch Typing Method:

The old method used for keyboarding which is used widely is the “hunt and peck” method of keyboarding. It is a very tedious and ineffective typing method. People using this typing style are either not capable or not willing to spend time for memorizing the keys position on keyboarding for adopting the standard the finger position techniques. Unless we are a person who interacts with the keyboard rarely, we will definitely benefit from efficiency which is generated through memorization of keyboard and touch typing methods.

Checklist for Speed Typing

In addition to learning touch typing; most of the people are able to increase the keyboarding speed and efficiency through a mix of:

1. Maintaining the right typing speed which means sitting erect with the elbows to our sides and the finger should neither press down nor hover, but it should rest gently on the right keys in the standard position.
2. Ensuring that keyboard is placed at proper height. Many keyboard and desks will set in standard height. We must be aware that if we are taller or shorter than the average, we would require adjusting our chair for establishing proper positioning.
3. Typing with the finesse which means typing fluidly when fingers rest on keyboard gently.
4. Refrain ourselves from overworking. We should take periodic rests from our typing routine and relax our fingers for some time. Gluing ourselves to a keyboard for a long time of uninterrupted keyboarding shall lead us to problems related to fatigue and reduce our productivity in long run.
5. Monitoring our typing speed and the accuracy through frequent returning to the free typing tests which are available online could motivate us for higher speed levels and accuracy as we find the results.

Typing speed and accuracy is the most important which we do not care about at early point of time. But when seeing other typing on keyboard fast, we might feel that “I wish I were that kind of person”. The average speed of typing for a normal person will range from 30 to 35 words per minute which is quite acceptable. But when we want to become a medical transcriptionist, we would require a minimum typing speed of at least 60 words per minute and 100 percent accuracy for which we would need to improve our keyboarding skills.

The commonly used keyboard layout is the QWERTY keyboard layout and we should first start practicing to type without looking at the keys present in the keyboard. It will be quite hard at beginning but we could catch up after some time. We should maintain the posture properly when typing and we should have a good arm rest so that both our hands are parallel to ground when we type in keyboard. The fingers must be raised slightly when we type. We can use ergonomic keyboard which is good for our hands. They keys will be arranged to help us type faster and we can avoid the carpal tunnel syndrome. We can take online typing tests and check our improvement. Though we make mistakes initially, we can increase the keyboarding speed and accuracy by practicing continuously.