Z and slash: little fingers down

Z sits below A and the slash sits below the semicolon. Both belong to the little fingers, and both are reached by curling down and slightly right. Z is the second rarest letter in English, so this reach will never be fast and does not need to be. The slash is more useful than it looks: it separates alternatives like yes/no and on/off, it appears in dates and web addresses, and it is the unshifted half of the question mark, which arrives in the next unit.

The little finger reaching down has the same wrist rule as reaching up: a small rotation is fine, lifting the hand is not. The index finger stays on its bump and the wrist turns just enough for the little finger to drop onto Z. Because Z is rare, it is the key most likely to be forgotten between sessions, so the words drill here uses more of it than real writing would.

With this lesson every letter of the alphabet has a finger and a path. The review that follows puts all twenty-six together with the comma, the full stop and the slash. After that, the only things left to learn on the letter block are the Shift key for capitals and the handful of punctuation marks that sit on shifted keys.

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