Top Tips For Typing

By Jenni Harrison | Top Tips

Typing is an important skill – you’ll need it for school, college, jobs and even some hobbies. Presenting your work in the best way possible will help you get further and achieve more. It will also help when entering our contests and our editors appreciate well laid-out entries to make their jobs easier!

If you’re typing your contest entry, follow these top tips to improve your typing skills and make your piece shine.

1. Your name. Without a name, or at least initials, we can’t accept your entry. Put it at the top of your piece so it’s clear and so that you know it’s done.

2. Put the word ‘Title:’ before your title, and on its own line. Then it’s clear that it’s your title and not included in the word count if there is a word limit.

3. Capitals and punctuation still count when typing so don’t forget your writing skills.

Capital letters are needed: 

• ·       At the start of new sentences 
• ·       For proper nouns. 
• ·       For the word ‘I’ as in ‘I went to the shops’
• ·       At the start of speech.

To add a capital letter: hold down the Shift button at the same time as the letter to capitalize it.  

Alternatively you can hit the Caps Lock button, but remember to hit it again to take it off or you’ll end up typing ALL IN CAPS!

4. Only use one space after a full stop. (Some people type with a double space but we don’t use that style.)

5. Watch out for extra spaces before other punctuation too. Most punctuation marks should be closed up to the previous word. (Exceptions: open bracket, open quote and currency symbols will be closed up to the word that follows it, and dashes have a space either side.)

6. Use double speech marks. The double quote mark is usually next to the ‘Enter’ key on your keyboard. Hold it down with ‘Shift’ to type it.

7. Speaking of speech, if you have more than one person speaking, you need a new line when a new person starts speaking. 

“Hi George.”
“Oh hi Sarah, how are you today?” asked George.
Sarah replied, “I’m great thanks.”

8. Speaking of new lines, keep new paragraphs on the next line in stories. Some styles have an extra line space between paragraphs (like in this blog) but we don’t use that for our stories.)

9. Use spellcheck. It’s not perfect so make sure what it's suggesting is correct. It won’t pick up on everything but it can definitely help! 

In Word, go to: Review – Spelling and Grammar

In GoogleDocs go to: Tools – Spelling and Grammar

Let us know in the comments if you use a different program and where the spellcheck is!

10. Save your work! 

In Word, go to File-Save As. It will ask you where you want to save it. If you’re typing in school, ask your teacher where to save it. 

Give your file a name so that your teacher can identify it, and so you can find it again if you need to save and come back to it. Include the title of your work and your name so it’s easy to find. 

Google Docs will auto save, but you still need to give it a title. Go to the top left where it says ‘Untitled Document’ and click on it to edit.

Now you're ready to send your entry in to us! You can upload it here, or email it to us: [email protected]

You can see all our latest contests here. 

If you'd like a PDF version of this blog to share with your students, you can download it here.