Typing practice — what should you actually repeat?
The most common way people practice typing is retyping the same passage, faster each time. The speed that buys tends to stay tied to that passage. Measure on unfamiliar text and it usually has not moved as much as it felt.
This guide is about what to repeat so that it stays with you.
Your speed is not set by your top speed
Typing speed is not decided by how fast you go when you are flowing. It is decided by how often you hit a snag.
Large observational work on typing looks at factors like finger usage and the flow between keys (Dhakal et al., 2018). But that is observation across many people rather than a training experiment, and the paper itself notes the limits of its sample and generalization. It should not be read as “change this and gain that much.”
The framing is still useful for practice: what drags your average down is not the passages you type well, it is the few places you snag every single time.
First, log where you snag
Before changing how you practice, you need data. The FlowScore typing test shows accuracy alongside speed, but what you really need is which characters you got wrong.
Try this for a few days:
- While typing your ordinary text (chat, documents, notes), deliberately notice or jot down every spot you deleted and retyped.
- Three to five days gives you a short list. Usually the same spots keep coming back.
- Look at what kind they are — a particular letter combination, a hand-to-hand transition, numbers and symbols, a shifted key.
That is the diagnosis. Without it you cannot choose what to practice.
Then, change this
Try drilling only the combinations that snag. Not whole sentences — those two or three characters, slowly and correctly. Repeating them fast while still getting them wrong makes that hand shape the familiar one, which is the thing to avoid. (This is a general practice principle, not something measured for typing.)
Test on text you have not seen. Repeat the same passage and memory starts standing in for skill. Always measure on unfamiliar text.
Try setting an accuracy floor first. Make it a rule that you do not drop below, say, 95% accuracy, and go faster only within that. It is a way of pinning your position on the speed-accuracy curve. Which number is right differs by person, so pick your own.
Not looking at your hands comes first. While you are hunting for keys with your eyes, none of the above matters much. If you have not memorized the layout yet, that is the step you are on.
Fix your conditions when measuring
Typing scores are very sensitive to setup. To compare at all, keep these identical:
- The same keyboard. Different key height and travel makes your hands move differently.
- The same layout. Beyond the layout itself, even your language-switching habit affects the number.
- Physical and on-screen keyboards are separate records. A phone result and a laptop result are not comparable.
About units
English is measured in WPM, treating five characters as one word. Korean is measured in keystrokes per minute, since one syllable block takes two to five keystrokes (initial consonant, then a vowel that costs two if it is compound, then a final consonant that costs two if it is doubled). The two units do not convert cleanly, so do not line up records taken in different languages.
Worth knowing: the count is converted from the characters you typed correctly, not from the physical keys you pressed. Typos and backspaces are not counted, in either direction.
About expectations
This guide will not tell you “N days for N more words per minute.” Those numbers vary enormously with your starting point and with what was blocking you. What this guide suggests is one thing: find where you snag first. Once you know what to fix, the same practice time should buy more.
In short
- What drags your average down is the snags, not your top speed.
- Collecting where you delete and retype, over a few days, is where practice starts.
- Drill the snagging combinations slowly and correctly rather than repeating them fast while still wrong.
- Always measure on unfamiliar text with the same keyboard.