Prose: putting it together

With this unit you have typed, at speed, every kind of character an ordinary document contains: letters, capitals, the full set of punctuation, digits, and the symbols that sit above them. Nothing on the main block of the keyboard is a mystery any more. This review puts all of it into a few paragraphs that read like an email, a report and a note, and asks for forty words a minute, which is the speed at which most professional typists work all day.

The habits are the same ones this course began with, applied to harder text. Even pace, especially through the number-heavy sentence that would once have made you look down. Eyes ahead, so that a bracket or an exclamation mark is anticipated rather than discovered. Cheap corrections, because on a passage this long an uncorrected error costs net speed and a fumbled correction costs rhythm.

• Digits: one finger each, straight up two rows, straight back.
• Symbols: the digit's finger, the opposite hand on Shift.
• Punctuation: nothing before, one space after; quotation marks hug their words.

The Weak Spot Drill after this check will very likely target the number row, because it is new and because it is reached furthest. That is expected. Ten minutes on the digit drills from two lessons ago is the cure, and it is worth doing, because a typist who is fluent on numbers is rare and noticeable.