Why Most Touchscreen-Typing Advice Is Wrong

The advice almost everyone gives — "just practice with your thumbs, you'll get faster" — is wrong for most older adults. I've watched it not work in real time across a library reference desk for twelve years. The advice is built around how someone in their twenties learned to text, which is by texting four hundred times a day for a decade. Nobody in their seventies is going to do that. And nobody should have to.

What actually makes typing easier on a phone is not practice. It's getting the phone out of the way and letting the device do most of the work. There are three changes that, taken together, will let almost anyone type a message in under a minute without rage.

One: stop typing with your thumbs

This is the first thing I tell people and it's the most counterintuitive. The image we all have in our heads of how to text — two thumbs flying across the keys — was invented by teenagers with small flexible hands, then sold to the rest of us by every advertisement and every movie since 2003.

For most older adults, especially anyone with arthritis, dry skin, or hands that have done forty years of real work, two-thumb typing is the slowest and most error-prone way to do it. Your thumbs are wider than the keys. The angle is wrong. Half the time the phone registers a tap on the wrong letter.

The faster way is to hold the phone in your non-dominant hand (left for right-handers, right for left-handers) and tap with the index finger of the dominant hand. One finger, one key at a time. It feels slow at first. It is actually slightly faster, and it is much more accurate.

This is how Margaret O'Brien, who comes to the library every Tuesday at 11, types. She is eighty-three and she has typed entire emails to her son in Australia at the reference desk in under three minutes. She has never once used both thumbs.

Two: turn on the suggestion bar

Both iPhones and Android phones offer a row of word suggestions above the keyboard when you type. The phone watches what you've typed so far and offers the most likely next word. If the word it offers is right, you tap it and you've saved typing seven letters.

On most phones this is on by default. If yours isn't, the setting is buried but findable. iPhone: Settings → General → Keyboard → turn on Predictive. Android: Settings → System → Languages and input → On-screen keyboard → Gboard → Text correction → Show suggestion strip.

Once it's on, watch the suggestion bar as you type. After "I'll see you at" the bar usually offers the most likely next word ("the" or "your") plus two more options. After "let me check with" it'll often suggest your husband's or wife's name if you mention them often. The suggestion bar gets dramatically better with use because it's learning what you actually say.

Skeptics ask whether the phone is "reading" their messages. It's not sending them anywhere — the suggestions are produced on the phone itself, not by Apple or Google. (For those who really want to verify, see the privacy section of your phone's keyboard settings.)

Three: stop typing entirely

This is the one I should have led with. If you can find the small microphone button on the keyboard — usually in the bottom-right corner — tap it. Speak your message. Tap the microphone again to stop. The phone types what you said.

Dictation in 2026 is dramatically better than dictation in 2018. Strong regional accents are fine. Slower speech is fine. Whispering doesn't work — speak at a normal volume. Punctuation has to be spoken aloud: "How are you comma I was thinking about you yesterday period" produces "How are you, I was thinking about you yesterday."

Most of the texts and short emails my readers send could be dictated in under thirty seconds. Most of the texts they currently send take three minutes because they're typing them with two thumbs. The math is dramatic. Try it for a week before you decide whether you like it.

What I tell people who refuse all three

If you've decided you want to type with two thumbs on a small screen, the only real help I can offer is this: turn on Auto-Capitalization (it's already on) and turn on Auto-Correction (it's already on), and accept that the phone will occasionally autocorrect your message into nonsense. Press the small "x" on a suggestion you don't like to teach the phone not to suggest it again.

There's a famous joke from the early days of smartphones — the autocorrected message that goes catastrophically wrong, like the man trying to text his wife about "the duck" and ending up with something much worse. Those mistakes still happen. They're rarer than they used to be, but they're not gone. Read your message before you hit send. Always.

One more thing about the keyboard

If your fingers are too wide to hit the small keys accurately, the keyboard can be made bigger. iPhone: open the keyboard, press and hold the globe icon, choose the larger keyboard layout. Android: Settings → Languages and input → Gboard → Preferences → Keyboard height → Tall.

I find these settings underused. The default keyboard size is designed for someone with smaller fingers than mine. Yours might be too.

The phone will adjust. The advice that won't will tell you to keep practicing. I've watched too many people give up on smartphones because typing on them was a daily annoyance. It doesn't have to be. The phone is meant to help you, not vice versa.

Written by Margaret Holloway. Last verified 18 June 2026.