Published October 17, 2026 · 6-minute read
The generation that grew up swiping is signing up to learn the home row. In a September 28, 2026 report, Business Insider described young workers and students who never got a typing class teaching themselves touch typing — not as a retro hobby, but as an edge for AI prompts, fast-moving lectures and jobs where slow fingers quietly shorten every thought.
The story opens with Julia Andrusiak, now 26. In college she noticed a professor repeatedly pausing his lecture and realised she was the disruption: her slow, two-finger typing was loud enough to break his concentration. So she drilled on her own — first typing out books, which made her faster but left her still staring at the keyboard, then working up to true touch typing, without looking. She now has an AI-focused job that involves helping people use the technology and writing strong prompts. For longer prompts she still sometimes dictates, and says she feels self-conscious doing it in an open office.
It sounds backwards. If an AI can write for you, why learn to type? The report's answer is that an AI is only as good as the prompt it is given, and voice prompts can come out rambling and imprecise. Typing a prompt lets you see the thought develop, add context and cut what does not belong — before you send it.
Andrey Gerasimov, a 23-year-old computer science graduate in the same report, taught himself for video-game chats and reached 170 WPM. His point was not the number. It was comfort: if giving an AI your full thoughts takes only a minute, you actually do it. If it takes ten, you shorten the idea instead. An 18-year-old sophomore at San Diego State made the classroom version of the same argument — professors move fast, students who have to look at the keyboard fall behind, and he called typing a potential bottleneck in an AI-shaped world.
There is also a social detail worth noting: dictating a long prompt out loud in a shared office or library feels awkward in a way typing never does. Several of the self-teachers in the reporting were, in part, learning to type so they would not have to talk to their computers in public.
None of this should have been a surprise. A separate September 23, 2026 Mashable report on basic computer skills students no longer learn found that touch typing has faded from the curriculum: a 2024 EdWeek Research Center survey found just 69% of U.S. districts teach keyboarding in a formal capacity at all, whether in the curriculum or as an elective — and what those classes actually teach is poorly tracked, with little public data on student proficiency.
State policy shows the same drift. As of 2025, Utah was one of only a few states that still listed motor typing skills such as proper hand placement in its standards — its K-5 keyboarding standards called the skill a critical literacy — and the state has since passed a modernisation of those standards. California includes keyboard proficiency in its standards but, according to its Department of Education, does not test or measure it at state level. In both states, the newer priority arriving on top is AI literacy — a harder skill being layered over a basic one that was never finished.
Australia shows the hardware side of the same problem. In a national study led by Dr Anabela Malpique at Edith Cowan University, 340 primary school teachers reported spending less than one hour a week teaching students to write using a computer. Only 17.4% said their students had access to a computer with an external keyboard at school; nearly 70% said access was limited to on-screen keyboards on tablets. More than 96% of those teachers believed keyboarding ability directly affected performance in national online exams. You cannot learn a physical keyboard on a sheet of glass, however good your thumbs get.
The methods in the reporting are unglamorous, and they match what works for adults relearning any motor skill:
Educators are buying in, literally in one case: the founder of BYOK, a distraction-free digital typewriter device, told Business Insider that around 10% of its orders now come from educators, from elementary schools to universities, including a high school creative writing teacher buying them to cut down on AI and distractions. That is a niche product, not a national statistic — but as a signal of where teacher demand is pointing, it points back to basics.
Start by measuring honestly. Take a 60-second KeyK test and note both numbers — speed and accuracy. Then compare them with the right benchmark: a January 2026 national study put the median U.S. adult at 37.8 accuracy-adjusted WPM, as we covered in the 2026 average typing speed. If you are a fast two-finger typist, expect touch typing to make you slower for the first week or two. That dip is the tuition every self-teacher in the reporting paid.
After that, the fundamentals do the work: accuracy before speed, fingers on the home row, eyes on the screen. Our typing tips lay them out, and if your speed stalls at the same number for months once you have switched, read why typing speed plateaus — the usual cause is practising the same comfortable text, not a lack of talent. Ten to fifteen focused minutes a day is the dose the research and the teachers keep landing on; it is also, not coincidentally, about the length of one good AI prompt session.
This article is the starting point. Copy any of these prompts into your favorite AI assistant to learn more about relearning touch typing as an adult:
🔎 Build a catch-up plan for a two-finger typist
I am [age] and I type [your WPM] WPM with two fingers while looking at the keyboard. I can practice 15 minutes a day. Build me a week-by-week plan to switch to touch typing: when to expect my speed to drop, when it should pass my old speed, which home-row drills to do first, and how to measure progress with a weekly median instead of single tests.
🧭 Turn typing speed into better AI prompts
I use AI for [your work or study task] but I keep my prompts short because typing long ones feels slow. Show me a prompt structure I can type in under a minute that still includes goal, context, constraints and an example — then give me 3 practice prompts in my field that reward typing the full version instead of a short one.
💡 Decide whether dictation or typing fits each task
For each of these tasks — lecture notes, a precise AI prompt, a job application, and editing a draft — compare typing and voice dictation on speed, precision, privacy in a shared space, and editing cost. End with a simple rule I can follow for when to speak and when to type.
Tip: replace the bracketed parts with your own situation — the more specific your prompt, the more useful the answer.
One sharper AI prompt + one new typing topic every week. Free forever, unsubscribe anytime.
We never share your email. One email a week, that's the deal.