Describe something useful you learned from the internet

I want to talk about touch typing, which means typing with all ten fingers without looking at the keyboard. I learned it from the internet about one year ago, when I was in the final year of my bachelor in Dhaka.

The website I used is called Keybr. It's free and you don't need to make an account. It gives you lessons with only a few letters at first, and when you become faster, it adds more letters. I practised for twenty minutes every night, and on weekends I did some typing tests on other websites to check my speed.

The reason I wanted to learn it was my thesis. I had to write about fifteen thousand words, and I was typing with only two fingers, so it was taking me forever. Also my wrist started to pain after long time, and my friend told that it's because I was always looking down and up.

It has helped me a lot. Before I was typing maybe twenty words per minute, and now I can do around sixty. I finished my thesis two weeks before the deadline. And now I am doing some freelance transcription jobs online, which give me some extra money. I think it is one of the most useful skill I ever learned.

Something really useful I learned online was touch typing, so typing with all ten fingers without looking down at the keys. It's not glamorous, but it's probably saved me more time than anything else I've learned.

I used a free website called Keybr, which I'd recommend to anyone, mainly because it's so simple. It starts you off with just a handful of letters and only introduces new ones once you're accurate enough, so you never feel overwhelmed. I'd do about twenty minutes every evening, and at weekends I'd take a typing test on another site to see how I was improving.

The reason I bothered was my undergraduate thesis. I was in my final year in Dhaka, I had to write fifteen thousand words, and I was still pecking at the keyboard with two fingers, which was painfully slow. On top of that, I'd started getting a dull ache on my wrist, and a friend pointed out that my head was constantly bobbing up and down between the screen and the keys.

It's made a huge difference. My speed has gone from around twenty words a minute to about sixty, and I handed my thesis in a fortnight early, which was a first for me. Better still, I've been picking up freelance transcription work online, which is a nice bit of extra income. And, funnily enough, it'll help in the computer-delivered IELTS, because I can concentrate on what I'm writing rather than where the letters are.

The most useful thing I've picked up online is touch typing, the ability to type with all ten fingers without glancing at the keyboard. It sounds trivial, but I'd say it's paid for itself many times over.

I learned it on Keybr, a free, no-frills website that builds your skills very gradually: you start with five or six letters, and it only adds another once your accuracy is good enough, so you're never thrown in at the deep end. I committed to twenty minutes every evening, a bit like a workout, and every Friday I'd do a timed test on a different site to keep myself honest.

What drove me to it was my undergraduate thesis. I was in my final year in Dhaka, facing fifteen thousand words, and I was still hunting and pecking with two fingers, which made even a short paragraph feel like a chore. Worse, I'd developed a nagging pain in my right wrist, and a friend who watched me working pointed out that I was looking up and down between the screen and the keys every couple of seconds.

The pay-off has been out of all proportion to the effort. I went from about twenty words a minute to just over sixty in roughly three months, and I submitted the thesis two weeks ahead of the deadline, which nobody who knows me quite believed. Since then it's also opened up some freelance transcription work, which tops up my income nicely. But the real benefit is subtler: now that typing takes no thought at all, I can give all my attention to what I'm actually trying to say.