Words
How to actually type faster
Slowing down until you stop making errors is, counter-intuitively, the fastest route to a higher number.
Most advice on typing speed is about posture and finger placement. Those matter, but they are not where the time goes for someone who already types.
Why accuracy comes first
Every error costs far more than the keystroke that caused it. You have to notice it, move to backspace, delete, and retype — comfortably a second all in. At 60 words per minute, one second is a whole word.
So a run at 70 words per minute with 90% accuracy is slower in practice than one at 60 with 99%. And because only correct characters count towards the score on our typing test, the arithmetic makes the same point: errors do not merely fail to help, they actively subtract.
The practical instruction is uncomfortable. Deliberately slow down until your accuracy is consistently above 97%, then let the speed come back. Most people find the speed returns within a week or two and settles higher than it was.
What the consistency score is telling you
Consistency measures how steady your pace was across the passage, sampled once a second. It is the number most tests do not report and often the most actionable one.
A high average with low consistency almost never means general slowness. It means a handful of specific things are stalling you, and they are usually one of:
- Letter pairs needing the same finger twice.
ed,un,ny,my. - Reaches to the number row, especially with the left hand.
- Punctuation that needs a shift, particularly the apostrophe and the question mark.
- Capital letters mid-sentence, where the shift timing has to be exact.
- Unfamiliar words, where you drop out of motor memory and back into spelling.
The fix is targeted rather than general: take the ten worst combinations and drill those specifically for five minutes, rather than typing more passages and hoping.
Look at the screen
The single most common habit limiting an intermediate typist is glancing at the keyboard.
Each glance costs the time to look down, find your place on the screen again, and re-enter the rhythm. It also prevents you from noticing an error until several words later, at which point the correction is more expensive.
If you cannot type without looking, that is worth fixing before anything else, and it is genuinely uncomfortable for about a week. Covering your hands with a cloth is a crude technique that works.
What the numbers look like
| Speed | Roughly |
|---|---|
| Under 25 wpm | Hunt and peck, or a phone keyboard |
| 30–45 wpm | Common for an adult who types daily but never learned touch typing |
| 50–70 wpm | Comfortable touch typing; most office work sits here |
| 80–100 wpm | Fast, usually someone who types for a living |
| Over 100 wpm | Unusual, and always with deliberate practice behind it |
Two things distort comparisons more than people allow for. Keyboard matters — the same person can differ by ten words per minute between a laptop and a mechanical board. And the text matters enormously: tests using a shuffled list of the 200 commonest English words produce numbers 10 to 20 per cent higher than real prose, because they strip out capitals, punctuation and unfamiliar vocabulary.
That is why our test uses real sentences. The number is lower and it is closer to how fast you actually write an email.
How long improvement takes
Slower than the internet suggests. For someone already touch typing, a few words per minute a month is a normal rate, and it is not linear — long plateaus are the usual experience.
Fifteen minutes a day beats two hours on a Sunday. Typing is a motor skill, and motor skills consolidate with spacing rather than volume. The same principle underlies why spaced practice works for memory, and it applies at least as strongly here.
Expect the first week of deliberate accuracy work to make your speed worse. That is the method working, not failing.
Should you switch layout?
Probably not.
Dvorak and Colemak are designed to reduce finger travel, and the ergonomic argument for them is reasonable. The speed argument is much weaker than their advocates suggest: the studies usually cited are old, small, or conducted by interested parties, and the modern consensus is that a proficient typist gains little.
What is certain is the cost. You will type at perhaps 20 words per minute for several weeks, you will be slow on any computer that is not yours, and you will lose most keyboard shortcuts in the transition. If your hands hurt, that is a real reason to investigate. If you want to be faster, practising on the layout you already know is a far better use of the same weeks.
Why speed plateaus, and what to do about it
Most people improve quickly for a few weeks and then stop, often well below what they are capable of. The plateau is usually not a limit — it is a set of habits that have become automatic and are now invisible.
Three of them account for most cases:
Reaching with the wrong finger. Comfortable, faster in the short term, and it caps you, because the hand has to be repositioned afterwards. It is also the hardest to notice, since by definition it feels natural.
Pausing at punctuation. The apostrophe and the question mark both need a shift and a reach, and many people stop momentarily before them. That shows up as a low consistency score with no obvious slow letters.
Reading too far ahead, or not far enough. Fluent typists are usually looking three or four words ahead. Reading word by word caps your rate at how fast you can read one word at a time, which is slower than you can type.
Breaking any of these means going deliberately slower for a week while a new pattern forms. That is genuinely unpleasant and it is the only route past the plateau.
What about phones?
Different skill, different ceiling, and worth separating from the numbers above.
Thumb typing on a touchscreen tops out far lower than a keyboard for almost everyone, and the limiting factor is different: not finger travel but the absence of tactile feedback, so you cannot confirm a key was hit without looking. That is why autocorrect matters so much on a phone and so little on a keyboard.
If most of your writing happens on a phone, the highest-return changes are not about speed at all — a case that does not obstruct your thumbs, swipe input if it suits you, and learning your keyboard’s punctuation shortcuts. None of that will show up on a desktop typing test, and comparing the two numbers is not meaningful.
Ergonomics, briefly
Not the main determinant of speed, but the main determinant of whether you can keep typing for years.
Wrists roughly straight rather than angled up over a laptop. Elbows near a right angle. Screen high enough that you are not looking down. Shoulders relaxed rather than raised — a desk that is too high is the commonest cause of the last one.
If your hands or wrists hurt, stop optimising for speed and deal with that first. Typing faster with a technique that hurts is a way of arriving at the injury sooner.
A realistic practice routine
- Two minutes of accuracy-only typing. Aim for zero errors, at whatever speed that requires. Do not look at the speed.
- Five minutes on your specific problem pairs, taken from your consistency score.
- One timed run on the test, recorded, so there is a history to look at rather than an impression.
That is under ten minutes, and it is more effective than half an hour of typing passages at your current speed — which mostly rehearses the habits you already have, including the ones slowing you down.