You can now type every letter. What you cannot yet type is a sentence — not a real one, with pauses and endings and contractions. This lesson adds the marks that do that work.
The new keys
- , (comma) — right middle finger, one row down from
K. - . (full stop) — right ring finger, one row down from
L. - ' (apostrophe) — right little finger, one column right of
;.
All three belong to the right hand, and all three sit beside or below keys that finger already knows. The comma and full stop use the same downward curl you learned on the bottom row.
The spacing rules
Punctuation has typing conventions as much as grammatical ones, and getting them wrong is one of the most visible signs of an untrained typist:
- A comma and full stop attach to the word before them with no space, then take one space after.
- An apostrophe takes no space on either side —
don't, it's, we'll. - A single space follows a full stop. The double space after a sentence is a typewriter-era habit that modern proportional fonts render as an awkward gap.
The apostrophe is the tricky one
It lives under the right little finger, the weakest one, and it appears constantly in ordinary writing. Contractions like don't, can't, I'm and it's force the little finger to work mid-word, between two letters, with no pause to reposition.
Drill contractions specifically. They are far harder than the apostrophe in isolation, and they are what you will actually type.
A note for typing tests
If you are practising for a formal typing test, punctuation errors count exactly the same as letter errors, and a missing apostrophe is one of the most commonly missed characters. Slow down slightly whenever a contraction appears — the time cost is smaller than the accuracy penalty.