TYPING TIPS

How to actually type faster

Six things move your words per minute. Most typing advice buries them in posture diagrams and drill schedules, so here they are on their own, with what to expect and how long it takes.

By Hiren Solanki Published 24 August 2026 Updated 2 October 2026

1. Accuracy first

The instinct when you want to type faster is to type faster. It rarely works. A mistake is not neutral: you notice it, stop, delete, and re-type. One error costs about the time of three or four correct characters, and it breaks the rhythm that made them fast.

60 words per minute at 99% accuracy finishes a paragraph before 80 at 94%. If you change one thing, slow down until you are barely making mistakes and let the speed return on its own. It comes back higher.

2. Stop looking at the keyboard

Every glance down costs half a second, and it stops you building the muscle memory that touch typing runs on. Fingers learn a position by being wrong and correcting, which cannot happen while your eyes do the work for them.

The first few sessions feel worse than looking. That cost is paid once. Most keyboards have small ridges on F and J so you can find the home position by touch.

3. Find your own weak keys

Almost everyone has four or five keys causing most of their errors, and almost nobody can name them. People guess Q and Z because those feel awkward, but they are rare in real text. The expensive keys are common ones your fingers reach badly: usually Y, B, the number row, or whatever your weaker hand is responsible for.

A general word list spends most of its time on keys you are already fine at. Your own weak keys are several times more efficient for the same minutes.

KEYSTORM was built for this. It scores each letter separately, so afterwards you get a ranked list of the keys costing you the most time, and a drill made only of words containing them.

4. Use all your fingers

Plenty of quick typists settle on four or six fingers and a lot of hand movement. It works to about 60 words per minute and then stops, because past that point the time goes on moving the hands across the board.

Giving each finger its own columns removes the travel. It is genuinely slower for a week or two, which is why most people give up. Accept the dip or stay at the ceiling.

5. Learn words, not letters

Past a certain point you stop typing letters and start typing whole words as one gesture. the, and, that and because become a single motion instead of three to seven decisions. That is most of what separates 70 words per minute from 100.

It comes from repetition on common words specifically, which is why frequent English beats random letter strings. KEYSTORM's Common word list is there for this.

6. If you write code, practise code

Programming has a different keystroke profile from prose: heavy on symbols, camel case, short identifiers, and words that never appear in normal writing. Speed on English prose transfers less than you would hope.

The vocabulary is worth drilling on its own: async, await, buffer, iterator, middleware, rebase. You type these hundreds of times a week. KEYSTORM ships a Code word list for exactly this.

How often to practise

Typing is a motor skill, and a lot of the improvement happens in the gaps between practice sessions. Ten minutes a day for two weeks beats two hours on a Sunday.

This is why a daily challenge works better than an open-ended session. A fixed run you can finish in two minutes still gets done on a busy day, and the days you do not skip are the ones that compound.

What to expect

Improvement is not linear. Expect a fast climb early, a long flat stretch in the middle, and gains that arrive in steps. Most people decide they have peaked during the flat stretch, a few weeks before they would have moved.

The short version

• Slow down until you stop making mistakes, then rebuild speed.
• Do not look at the keyboard, even at first.
• Find your own weak keys instead of guessing at them.
• Practise common words, not random characters.
• If you write code, practise code vocabulary too.
• Ten minutes most days, not two hours once.