How to Type Faster

Master the home row

Touch typing starts with the home row. Rest your left fingers on A, S, D and F, and your right fingers on J, K, L and the semicolon. Most keyboards have small bumps on the F and J keys so you can find this position without looking. From here, each finger is responsible for the keys directly above and below it, and your thumbs handle the space bar. Learning this map is the foundation of speed, because every other key is reached relative to home row.

Fix your posture

Good posture makes fast typing sustainable. The keyboard guidance from the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration comes down to four checks: the keyboard sits directly in front of you, your elbows are at about the same height as the keyboard and hang comfortably at your sides, your wrists are straight and in line with your forearms, and your shoulders are relaxed with your elbows close to your body.

Each of those checks also matters for speed. A keyboard set off to one side makes one hand reach further than the other, and bent wrists turn every keystroke into a small strain. Tension is the enemy of speed: tight fingers move slowly and tire quickly, while loose, light keystrokes let you type for longer without discomfort.

Prioritise accuracy, then speed

It sounds backwards, but the fastest typists got there by slowing down first. Every mistake costs you a keystroke to make and another to delete, so clean typing is quicker than fast typing full of corrections. Practise at a pace where you can keep accuracy above 95 percent, and let speed grow naturally as the movements become automatic. Chasing raw speed before accuracy just teaches your fingers bad habits you will have to unlearn.

What the fastest typists actually do differently

The 2018 analysis of 136 million keystrokes by Aalto University and the University of Cambridge looked at what separated its fastest participants from the rest, and three findings are useful for practice. First, the fast typists made fewer errors, so speed and accuracy grew together rather than trading off. Second, they used rollover typing, pressing the next key before releasing the previous one, in 40 to 70 percent of their keystrokes. Third, they used more fingers, 8.4 on average against 5.3 for the slow typists, though not necessarily all ten.

Two practical conclusions follow. Rollover is not something to force; it shows up when common letter sequences stop being separate decisions, which is exactly what short, repeated drills on the same words produce. And a typing course on its own is no shortcut: in the same data, people who had taken one were only about 5 WPM faster than people who had not. What you practise, and how often, matters more than whether you were taught.

Drills that build speed

Short, frequent practice beats occasional marathons. Take a one minute typing test every day and try to nudge your best up a little. Repeat words you stumble on until they feel smooth. Practise common letter pairs and short phrases so your fingers learn the patterns that appear again and again. Above all, do not look down: cover your hands if you have to. Ten focused minutes a day will move your speed further in a month than hours of unfocused typing.

Each of the three sections above has a drill on this site that trains exactly that one thing, with its own word list rather than the standard passage: the home row drill never leaves a s d f g h j k l, the accuracy drill refuses a wrong key outright, and the numbers and symbols drill types the digits, dates and codes a word list never contains.

Which drill fixes which problem

If your fingers wander and you keep glancing down, the problem is position, and the home row drill is the one to run. It uses only words that can be typed from the resting row, so there is no reaching to hide behind and a drifted hand shows up immediately. Two or three 30 second runs a day for a week is the whole prescription.

If your speed is fine but your accuracy is not, run the accuracy drill. It refuses any character that does not match the passage, so mistakes cost time instead of points and you cannot type past them. Its word list is made of ordinary words whose letters are the ones fingers most often transpose or double.

If your work involves invoices, records, dates or code, run the numbers and symbols drill. Almost every typing test measures you on lowercase words, and almost nobody types only lowercase words for a living; the moment a decimal point or a bracket appears, most people slow down sharply and never find out by how much.

Then go back to the 1 minute typing test and see whether the number moved. A drill that does not eventually show up in a normal test result is a drill you can stop doing.

Why 15 minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday

This is one of the oldest findings in skill training, and it was measured on typing. In 1978 Baddeley and Longman trained four groups of postal workers to type on a keyboard, with sessions of one or two hours, once or twice a day. The group with a single one hour session per day learned best, the group with two two hour sessions per day learned worst, and the authors concluded that keyboard training should be spread out over time rather than crammed.

The same study checked retention one, three and nine months later and found typing speed fell by roughly 30 percent once practice stopped. That is the case for a short daily habit over a burst of effort: gains that are not kept in use fade. The plan below is built around one short block a day for exactly that reason.

A two week practice plan, 15 minutes a day

Run the plan in the order shown, one block per day, and do not skip ahead when a day feels easy: the pass mark at the end of each stage is the signal to move on. The home row drill, the accuracy drill and the numbers and symbols drill each have their own page on this site, and every scored run is saved to your history automatically.

The accuracy drill refuses wrong keys, so its accuracy always reads 100 percent. Its useful figure is the keys refused count on the results screen, and that is what the pass marks below use. The targets themselves are this guide's coaching suggestions rather than research figures: they are set so that accuracy is secure before speed is pushed.

Before day 1, it is worth one run on the typing test to find out which keys hold you back. Once a run has at least 100 keystrokes to go on, the results name your three weakest keys, and Practice these keys builds a drill on exactly those letters. That drill is a good fit for the days 11 to 13 block, which asks for whichever drill has your weakest numbers so far.

The tracker below holds the same plan as a checklist. Tick each block once its pass mark is met; the ticks stay in this browser only, each block links straight to its drill, and the print button gives you a one page paper copy with empty boxes for each day.

How to tell whether the practice is working

Every test you finish on TypeBurst is stored in your own browser, with its WPM, net WPM, accuracy, duration, word list and the page it came from. The progress page turns that into a chart of your recent runs, a personal best for each duration and a list you can export as CSV or JSON. Nothing is uploaded, so the record is complete without an account.

Compare like with like. A 30 second sprint and a 5 minute run measure different things, and a run on the home row word list is not comparable with one on common words, so keep your weekly check on the same test: the 1 minute typing test on common words is the simplest choice. Judge on the middle of three runs rather than your best one, and watch accuracy alongside speed. A week where speed rose but accuracy fell is a week where you practised mistakes faster.

If two weeks pass with no change in your median, the usual cause is practice that is too comfortable. Go back to the drill that matches your weakest result, slow down until the pass mark is easy, then rebuild speed from there.

Two week typing practice plan, 15 minutes a day

Each day ends with a scored run, so the plan checks itself. Minutes are approximate and include a short pause between runs.

Sources

1. Baddeley & Longman, The influence of length and frequency of training session on the rate of learning to type, Ergonomics 21(8), 1978
2. Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson & Oulasvirta, Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes, CHI 2018
3. The traits of fast typists discovered by analysing 136 million keystrokes, Aalto University
4. Computer Workstations eTool: Keyboards, US Occupational Safety and Health Administration
5. Words per minute, on two-finger typing speeds

Method: the research figures above are quoted from the listed sources. The practice plan and its pass marks are this guide's own coaching suggestions, and the scores you check them against are measured in your browser as correct characters divided by five divided by the minutes elapsed. Read the full measurement methodology.