Typing posture and technique

Speed comes from relaxed, repeatable movements. A few minutes spent adjusting your chair, desk and screen makes long practice sessions more comfortable, and good habits at the keyboard make your speed more consistent.

Set up your workstation

The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) publishes office ergonomics guidance. The points below are our summary of its keyboard and monitor fact sheets:

• Straight wrists. Keep your wrists straight and in line with your forearms while you type.
• Elbows at about a right angle. CCOHS gives roughly 90 degrees, between 90 and 110, with forearms about level with the floor. Adjust the chair, desk or keyboard height to get there.
• Keyboard close, but not at the edge. Place the keyboard and mouse near the front of the desk so you do not reach forward, without letting them sit right on the edge.
• Adjust the slope for your wrists. A keyboard or tray that lets you raise the back or the front helps you keep a neutral wrist. Use whichever keeps your wrists straight.
• Do not rest your wrists on the desk. CCOHS advises against it; use a wrist rest only if you need one.
• Light key presses. Choose a keyboard that does not need forceful key presses, and do not hammer the keys.
• Screen at arm's length, top not above eye level. Put the monitor you use most directly in front of you. If text is hard to read at that distance, enlarge the text instead of leaning in.
• Short breaks. Even a well set-up desk gets tiring. Take short breaks to stretch and let your muscles recover.

Source: Office Ergonomics - Keyboard Selection and Use, Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS). Checked 26 October 2026.

Source: Office Ergonomics - Positioning the Monitor, Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS). Checked 26 October 2026.

Technique at the keyboard

The rest of this page is our own advice from the practice plan on this site, not from a published standard.

Start from the home position

Rest your left-hand fingers on A, S, D and F and your right-hand fingers on J, K, L and the semicolon key, with thumbs over the space bar. If your keyboard has small raised marks on F and J, use them to find this position without looking. Every reach should start from here and come back here.

Look at the passage, not your hands

Every glance down costs time and breaks your place in the passage. If you must look while learning, look, then return your eyes to the screen before you press the key. The practice plan shows how to wean yourself off looking.

Use the opposite Shift key

For a capital letter typed with the left hand, hold the right Shift key with your right little finger, and the other way round. It keeps both hands near home position.

Keep an even rhythm

Try to type at a pace you can hold steady, rather than in fast bursts followed by pauses to fix errors. In a timed test, a correction costs the time to notice, delete and retype the word.

Accuracy first

In TypeTez's net speed, a word with one wrong letter earns nothing. In SSC's evaluation guidelines, spelling errors count as full mistakes. Slowing down a little to stay accurate usually raises your net score.

Source: Revised guidelines for evaluation of Typing Test/DEST scripts (English/Hindi), Staff Selection Commission, Eastern Region (Kolkata). Checked 26 October 2026.

Hindi typing

Unicode stores Devanagari in the order it is spoken, so on Inscript you type the consonant first and then the vowel sign, even for ि (i), which appears to the left of the consonant. Conjuncts are built with the virama: क्ष is क, then the virama, then ष.

Source: The Unicode Standard, Chapter 12: South and Central Asia-I, Unicode Consortium. Checked 26 October 2026.