Typing habits for the PTE keyboard

If you have to hunt for letters, your thinking slows down to the speed of your fingers. In a test where you type essays, summaries and dictated sentences against the clock, that is a real cost. You do not need to be fast, but you do need to type without staring at the keys and without a typo every other line.

Where typing earns or loses marks

Write Essay, Summarize Written Text, Summarize Spoken Text and Write from Dictation are typed from start to finish. In Listening Fill in the Blanks you type while the recording is still playing. Spelling is one of the enabling skills, and typed answers are where it shows up, so a slip of the finger is not just a cosmetic problem.

Speed matters too, a little. At 15 words a minute, a 250-word essay takes nearly 17 minutes of pure typing. At 30 words a minute it takes about eight. In dictation you hear the sentence once, and the words fade from memory while you look for the letters. For the time each task allows, check the timer on screen and Pearson's current test guide.

Touch-typing basics, with accuracy first

Rest your fingers on the home row: left hand on A, S, D and F, right hand on J, K, L and the semicolon, with your index fingers on F and J. Most keyboards have a small bump on those two keys so you can find them by touch. Each finger looks after its own columns of keys, and your thumbs take the space bar. Use the Shift key on the opposite side from the letter you are capitalising.

Keep your eyes on the screen. If you cannot stop looking down, drape a tea towel over your hands and type slowly until your fingers remember the layout.

Accuracy comes before speed. Slow down until you make very few mistakes, then speed up a little. Speed that produces typos is only a quicker way to be wrong. A smooth, even rhythm of 25 words a minute will do more for you than bursts of 40 followed by stalls and corrections.

Measure it: copy-typing and words per minute

Ten minutes a day is enough, and the simplest drill is copy-typing, because you do not have to think of anything to say.

1. Take a paragraph of about 60 words from a book or a newspaper, or use the practice paragraph below.
2. Start a timer and type the paragraph without looking at the keys.
3. Divide the number of words by the minutes taken. That is your speed.
4. Compare your text with the original and count the words that contain a mistake. Accuracy is the number of correct words divided by the total.
5. Write both numbers in a notebook.

That paragraph is an illustrative example, exactly 60 words long, with double letters, an apostrophe, a hyphen and a number: the places where fingers tend to slip.

Say you type it in three minutes, which is 20 words a minute. Four words contain mistakes, so 56 out of 60 are right, which is 93 per cent. Tomorrow's target is not 25 words a minute. It is the same 20 with two mistakes or fewer, which is about 97 per cent. Raise the speed only when the accuracy holds.

Keyboards and editing tools

You will probably not choose the keyboard on the day, so practise on more than one. If you usually type on a laptop or a phone, spend part of each week on a full-size keyboard. Layouts differ between machines and countries: the apostrophe, the quotation mark and the hyphen are not in the same place on every layout, and some countries use layouts such as AZERTY or QWERTZ where a few letters have moved as well.

The test gives you a basic box to type in, with some editing tools. Check Pearson's current test guide for exactly which ones, and do not count on automatic spell-checking or word suggestions. Practise in a plain text editor with autocorrect and red underlines switched off, so that checking your spelling is a habit and not something the software does for you.

A four-week plan, ten minutes a day

• Week 1, placement: home row and nearby keys only, eyes off the keyboard, slow. The same short paragraph every day. Judge only accuracy.
• Week 2, rhythm: the 60-word drill daily, noting speed and accuracy. Speed up only when you reach about 97 per cent.
• Week 3, typing from sound: on three days, swap the drill for dictation. Play a short sentence once, from any English talk or a practice task, then pause and type it from memory. On the other days, try a different keyboard.
• Week 4, test conditions: one timed essay or summary a day in the plain text editor, no spell-check, with two minutes at the end to read it through.

Start today: copy-type the paragraph above and write down your two numbers. Then put the skill to work with Write from Dictation: how to catch more words, and try typed tasks in the practice tests on this site.