I'm a rubbish typist.
Attempting to learn touch typing in school, I failed miserably. Both failed in the general sense of not learning to type as I was meant to, and failed in the specific sense of, 'I was graded on my ability to touch type and I failed.' I've come to believe the primary reason for my inability to type from the home keys is my lack of agility with my right hand. In general, my right hand has far slower reaction times than my left, and specifically, its fingers do not like to bend at the angles necessary to type from the home row. I can make them do it, but it's a slow, laborious process—at least compared to how fast we're meant to type—and in some cases, such as lowering my fingers to type on the bottom keyboard row, requires me to focus so much to make my fingers perform the action that it distracts me from the text I'm meant to type.
Because of this, I've always typed primarily using my index fingers, occasionally supplementing them with my thumbs. The majority of (letter) keys I type with my left index finger; my right index finger handles the keys from the UHB column and rightwards (which I suppose means it actually deals with more than half the keyboard, though it somehow doesn't feel that way). While I occasionally use my thumbs on the spacebar, more often than not, my index fingers handle it as well—normally the one that didn't just type a letter (so when I write the word, 'Anastasia,' ending it with a left-hand-typed 'a,' my right index finger will press the spacebar). My left pinky finger presses the shift key. Always. The right shift button is the cleanest key on my keyboard; I don't know that I've ever intentionally pressed it.
Despite this hunt-and-peck method, I don't normally look at my keyboard while typing. That's not to say it never happens, and sometimes I look more than others, but I normally don't have to look down at my keyboard to know where the keys are. It's as if I have the same muscle memory one would expect from a proper touch-typist, despite not properly doing such. I mainly only look at my keyboard when I begin typing a given piece of text or if I begin making errors.
Speed-wise, I today wondered exactly how fast I typed now, and so did a one-minute typing test on TypingTest.com, from which I obtained the benchmark ranges used in the poll. It claims the average typing speed is 36 AWPM, and the average touch typist's speed is 58 AWPM. I got 68 AWPM (70 words per minute, adjusted for having made two errors), which it ranked as, 'Fast.'
So maybe, despite my shunning touch-typing, I'm not such a rubbish typist after all. (Or maybe, as KiWi pointed out, online typing tests are inherently inaccurate because they're a controlled environment. Thanks for making me feel good about myself, KiWi. )
Edited by Anastasia, 09 June 2016 - 06:19 PM.