Fact · Typing and writing speed
The largest difference between fast and slow typists was in substitution error rate, where a wrong character replaces the intended one.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“Comparing fast with slow typists, we can see that there is a particularly large difference in substitution error rate”
Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes, Vivek Dhakal et al., CHI 2018, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018, Results, Errors and error-correction behaviour.
Open the original (DOI 10.1145/3173574.3174220)- What it measures
- A substitution is a wrong character typed in place of the intended one, such as a neighboring key.
- What it does not show
- The paper calls this difference particularly large; its explanation for it is a hypothesis.