You still type on a keyboard? In a time of transcription software and autocorrect, the old touch type approach to writing texts seems a bit outdated. Is learning to type properly even worth the effort any more?
Those who have learned touch typing are usually proud of it. After all, it's an efficient technique and when you're good at it you can type quickly and accurately without even looking at the keyboard.
But is it still worth learning today when we have voice assistants and transcription software that can understand what we say? Is it now a skill from a bygone age?
The principle behind ten-finger typing is relatively simple, starting with the basic position.
The fingers of the left hand are poised over the A, S, D, and F keys while the fingers of the right hand rest on J, K, L and O. From there they're ready to move up and down to any key. The thumbs hover over the spacebar.
"We haven't developed a better way to teach someone to type so far. It is therefore still the best, but also the only system that we can fall back on," says Anna Maria Feit.
She's the chair of computer science at the ETH Zurich university and focuses on the area of text input.
She says she's "not convinced" by the superiority of the ten-finger method herself. You can also type quite well with six fingers, she says.
In 2016, Feit and other researchers at Aalto University in Helsinki examined different typing styles and compared them with the ten-finger system.
They found that participants who had acquired their own technique were sometimes just as fast as touch typists.
However, the study also found that those people looked at their fingers and the keyboard much more often than people using the ten-finger method did.
Regina Hofmann of the German Stenographers Association confirms this. She don't know anyone using their own system who can type without looking down.
"With the ten-finger system, on the other hand, you no longer look at the keyboard. You know which way your fingers have to go," she says.
That in turn can benefit the typist's health, according to Thomas Brockamp, prevention expert at the German Society for Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery.
"If you master the ten-finger system, you have well-structured control of the hands," he says, stressing that, like piano players, people need to take care to ensure that the wrist does not bend.
The easier it is for you to touch the keys, the more you can concentrate on the correct hand position, explains the specialist. "It's different if you always need to think about where the next letter is."
So ultimately, learning touch typing can still be worthwhile today, whether you do so online or go to a class. The younger you are when you learn, the better. "The earlier you learn ten-finger writing, the better you can use it," Hofmann says.
But is typing still an essential workplace skill in this era of smartphones and voice assistants?
"I've met young people who told me that they didn't have a keyboard or never actually wrote on one. They have their mobile phone for that," Feit says.
Nevertheless, typing still has a role in many office jobs. "I don't think that learning touch typing will become superfluous," says Jan Kluczniok from the website Netzwelt.
After all, transcription software isn't always available and may not be appropriate in every environment, for example open plan offices.
And when dealing with longer texts, you will always have to make corrections or changes. "And they will go much faster with ten fingers," Kluczniok says. – dpa
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