Kabir finds a heavy black typewriter in a trunk in the attic. His grandmother, it turns out, was once the fastest typist in the Collector's office in Nagpur — and that summer she teaches him the way she learned.
What this story trains
- Dialogue at the start of a paragraph. Several parts open with a quotation mark rather than a letter. Make sure your first keystroke is the mark, not the word.
- Hyphenated words.
silver-edged, clack-clack-clack and others use the hyphen key under your right little finger. - Possessives.
grandmother's, Collector's and teacher's all need the apostrophe in exactly the right place. - Capital letters in a list. Part 6 names the home row keys one by one:
A, S, D and F. Use the opposite Shift key for each capital.
The lesson inside the story
On a typewriter there is no backspace. Every error means retyping the page, so typists learned to be accurate first and fast second. As Kabir discovers, care turns out to be faster than haste: a slower typist who never has to retype finishes before a fast one who does.
The same is true on a computer. Backspacing feels free, but every correction costs keystrokes and breaks your rhythm.
How to approach it
Try typing this story without correcting anything, as if you were on a typewriter. Then check your accuracy. If it is above 95 percent, you are typing at the right pace.
Practice notes
The story ends with a line worth remembering: keys change and machines change, but good habits never go out of date. The home row technique in this course works on any keyboard you will ever use.