How to Type Faster: What Actually Raises Your WPM

Typing gets faster through accurate practice on the words you actually type, and some of the habits that set fast typists apart can be practiced. The largest keystroke study found that fast typists press the next key before the last one lifts ¹. A lab study found that keeping one finger for each letter predicts high performance ², and Salthouse's 1986 review found that the eye-hand span grows with skill ³. Short daily sessions are likely a better schedule than long occasional ones, based on spacing research, and for many people the quickest gain is typing less. This guide covers each method, the evidence behind it, and where the evidence is thin. For the baseline, see the guide to typing speed and words per minute.

Speed comes from accurate practice, not from rushing

Accuracy and speed are closely linked. One of the researchers behind the 136 million keystroke study, Anna Feit, explained that slower typists make more errors and then spend a long time finding and fixing them ⁴. Every correction costs time, so a faster pace that adds errors can end up slower overall.

The same study sorted its typists by speed. The fast group was made up of people faster than 90 percent of participants, which meant above about 78 words per minute ⁵. The slowest 10 percent were below about 26 words per minute ⁶. The average participant typed 51.56 words per minute ⁷, so the fast threshold is about 1.5 times the average ⁸.

The range is wide. The fastest typists in the dataset reached 120 words per minute or more ⁹. This guide counts speed in words of five characters, the convention of the How We Type test ¹⁰. The 136 million keystroke figures come from one online test, so they may not carry over to other tests or texts. The same clustering of typing data found that most users can be divided into eight groups of typists, which differ in performance and accuracy ¹¹, so compare your numbers with your own past results rather than with one benchmark.

Accuracy is also a training target. In a 2009 experiment, skilled typists who were cued to attend to the letters of one hand typed more slowly and made more errors ¹². This suggests that practice should build automatic movement rather than a careful, watchful style. How to keep accuracy while you speed up is covered in the question on typing faster without mistakes.

Fast typists press the next key before releasing the last one

Rollover typing means pressing the next key before the previous key comes back up. The study that measured it found that slow typists used almost none, while most fast typists used rollover on 40 to 70 percent of their keystrokes ¹. In the study, most typists used at least a little rollover ¹³, and across all the typists the rollover ratio correlated with performance at r = 0.73 ¹⁴.

A correlation of that size means the two measures move together. It does not mean that adding rollover will add a fixed amount of speed, and the study does not test training.

You cannot switch rollover on at will. Anna Feit, a researcher on the study, explained that the strategy is "only possible for highly practiced letter combinations and when performance does not rely on visual attention" ¹⁵. The practical route is to practice the pairs you type often. The study also found that letter pairs typed with different hands or fingers are more predictive of typing speed than letter repetitions are ¹⁶.

A simple way to notice rollover is to watch your own pairs. When your second key starts before the first one lifts, that pair is already rolling. Pairs that do not yet roll are the ones to practice in your own writing.

Keeping one finger for each letter is the first habit to build

Ten-finger touch typing is worth learning, but the evidence does not say it is required for speed. A 2016 study of self-taught typists found that they could reach performance levels comparable with touch typists, "even when using fewer fingers" ¹⁷. The study's motion capture data pointed to three predictors of high performance ².

The first predictor is the one most people can act on. The self-taught result suggests that you may not need the standard ten-finger layout to type quickly. If you already type with a mix of fingers, what you need is to stop changing which finger hits which letter. For the standard layout, see touch typing and the home row. If you hunt and peck, the hunt-and-peck entry explains that style.

Read ahead: fast typists look several characters past the one they are typing

Skilled typists keep their eyes ahead of their fingers. Salthouse's 1986 review of transcription typing defines eye-hand span as the amount of material between the character the eyes are on and the character whose key is being pressed. It says the span ranges from three to seven characters for average to excellent typists ¹⁸. The span grows as skill grows ³, so a longer look-ahead is one of the things that changes as typing improves.

To build it, try this routine:

1. Type from a printed page or a second window, so your eyes can see the next words without looking down at the keys.
2. Keep your eyes on the text. The study's researchers say that "an important goal for typing is to learn not to look at fingers" ¹⁹.
3. When a passage is clean, read a little further ahead, one word and then one phrase, and keep the error count at zero before you extend the look-ahead.

Practice slightly above your comfortable speed, on the words you really type

The most useful practice text is probably your own writing, because it contains the letter pairs you type. The pair finding ¹⁶ shows that pairs are linked to speed, but the study does not test whether drilling them raises speed, so using your own text is our reasoning rather than a tested result. Random word lists may spend time on pairs you rarely type.

A common suggestion is to push a little above your comfortable pace. We did not find a controlled study that tested it for typing, so treat it as a method to try, not a proven one. The evidence supports one caution, about errors: they take time to correct ⁴. A practical routine follows from that:

• Pick a passage of text you would type anyway.
• Type it at a pace where you make almost no errors, and note your time.
• Next session, speed up a little and keep the same error limit. If the errors come back, drop to the last pace that was clean.

To measure progress, time yourself on the same passage each week and count the errors you fix. Speed in this guide is words per minute, with a word counted as five characters, as on the How We Type test ¹⁰, so you can compare your result with the speeds above. A four-week plan that uses the steps above:

1. Week one: choose a finger for each letter you miss most, and keep it fixed.
2. Week two: practice the letter pairs in your own writing, and watch for the pairs that already roll.
3. Week three: type from a printed page, and extend your look-ahead one phrase at a time.
4. Week four: speed up in small steps, keeping the error limit, and drop back when errors return.

Our search found no randomized trial of typing games, so the question of whether typing games help is covered on its own page.

Plateaus can come from habits, and slow accurate drills may help break them

If your speed stalls for weeks, a habit may be holding you back more than a lack of effort. A 2003 study of touch-typing training notes that, in earlier research, "success in touch-typing training does not ensure its continuation into everyday use" ²⁰. Its authors describe visually guided typing as the strategy in which "the performer looks at the keys to locate their position" ²¹. They explain the drift back to that habit with melioration: "an intuitive tendency to choose typing strategies that lead to a better immediate performance level than that obtained by touch-typing" ²².

The same authors tested a fix with 22 students ²³. They changed the reward so that looking at the screen became more attractive during typing, and "under a modified reinforcement condition, the effect of melioration on touch-typing scores in the posttraining phase decreased" ²⁴. That is one small experiment, so treat it as a lead rather than a proven method.

For a plateau, we suggest slow, accurate drills:

• Lower the pace until the passage is clean.
• Keep your eyes on the text, as the Aalto researchers recommend ¹⁹.
• Speed up only after a clean run, and go back a step when errors return.

Signs that a habit may be holding you back:

• Your eyes go to the keys every time you reach a letter you are unsure of.
• Your speed drops when you switch to unfamiliar text, but your accuracy stays the same.
• Your error count rises as soon as you speed up, even on a passage you know well.

If the plateau persists after a few weeks of this, the question on why typing speed is not improving lists the usual causes.

Short daily sessions are likely better than one long weekly session

The spacing evidence favors short sessions spread across days. Donovan and Radosevich's meta-analysis of practice schedules pooled studies and found that spaced practice beat massed practice, with a mean weighted effect size of 0.46 ²⁵. The effect does not appear in every study, and the pooled studies covered many kinds of task. A 2006 review of verbal recall studies covered 839 assessments ²⁶. Neither study tested typing, so they support the pattern rather than prove it for typing.

The typing tutor Ratatype advises daily sessions of 10 to 15 minutes ²⁷. That is the company's own view of its product, not an independent test. The 15 to 30 minute range in this section is our recommendation, based on the spacing evidence and the accuracy rule above: we think short sessions also make it easier to keep errors low.

Typing less is often faster than typing faster: shortcuts, text expansion and dictation

The most direct way to type faster is to need fewer keystrokes. Keystrokes per character counts how many keystrokes it takes to produce one character. MacKenzie's 2002 figures for English run from about 10 for methods that use only cursor keys and a select key, down to about 0.5 for word prediction ²⁸.

These figures count keystrokes for each technique. They are not measured typing speeds, but they show how much typing a method can save. Word prediction and expansion are covered in text expanders and autocomplete.

Dictation is the other way to type less. In a controlled study on an iPhone, English text entered by speech reached 153 words per minute, against 52 words per minute on the built-in keyboard ^{29 30}. The study's speed counts finished text, including time spent correcting errors. Its phrases were short, read rather than composed, in a quiet room, and it did not measure long documents or the time spent editing a dictated draft afterwards. For that comparison, see speaking versus typing speed and our overview of dictation.

Shortcuts and templates also cut keystrokes. Copy, paste and undo shortcuts save the small movements that add up across a day, and saved phrases or signatures remove whole sentences from what you type.

Yap, which we make, is an on-device dictation app for Mac and Windows. You can try speaking your text without installing anything with dictation in your browser. The built-in options on your computer or phone may be enough for short notes, and you should judge them on your own drafts before you pay for anything.

What the evidence does not yet show

Several parts of this guide rest on thinner evidence than the numbers suggest, and you should weigh them that way.

• Speed thresholds come from one online sample. The fast and slow cut-offs describe volunteers who took one online typing test, so they will shift with a different test, text or group.
• Rollover is a correlation. It tracks speed closely, but the study does not show how much learning it would add for a particular typist.
• Look-ahead figures are from older laboratory work. The eye-hand span comes from a 1986 review of earlier laboratory studies with small samples.
• Training methods are tested in small trials. The 2003 experiment used 22 students ²³, and we found no randomized trial of typing games or of pushing above a comfortable pace.
• Dictation numbers come from short phrases. They say little about long documents or the editing that follows.

None of these limits argues against the basics: accurate practice, one steady finger per letter, looking at the text and short regular sessions. They do mean that your own measured progress should decide what to keep.

Where to go next

• Why is my typing speed not improving? covers the usual causes of a stall.
• How do you type faster without making mistakes? covers the accuracy side in more detail.
• Do typing games help you type faster? looks at what the evidence says about games.
• Touch typing explains the standard finger layout, and typing speed research summarizes the keystroke studies behind this guide.