Common Typing Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Most people are held back by three or four specific habits rather than by a general lack of practice. Each one is fixable, and fixing any of them is worth more than another month of typing the way you already type.
Looking at the keyboard
This is the habit that caps a speed permanently. Every glance down is a pause, and more importantly it prevents the movements from ever becoming automatic — you are looking up the answer instead of knowing it, so the knowing never develops.
The fix is uncomfortable and short: cover your hands, accept a week of being slower than you were, and do not look. A cheap way to enforce it is to type with the lights dim enough that the keys are hard to read.
Chasing speed instead of accuracy
Typing at the edge of control feels productive and is not. Every mistake costs the time to notice it, delete it and retype — roughly three keystrokes — so a 3% error rate costs you closer to 9% of your effort.
Drop to a pace where you make almost no mistakes, and hold it until it feels slow. That is the pace at which the movements consolidate. Speed follows on its own; it does not work in the other direction.
Using the wrong finger for a key
Reaching for a key with whichever finger is nearest works fine in isolation and falls apart in combination, because the next key is then reached from the wrong place. This shows up as a speed that is fine on common letters and collapses on particular pairs.
Each key belongs to one finger, and the reaching finger returns to the home row afterwards. If a specific letter feels awkward, check which finger you are using for it before assuming you need more practice — you may be practising the wrong movement.
Resting your wrists on the desk
Anchored wrists force the fingers to stretch for anything off the home row, which is slower and, over hours, harder on the hands. Float the wrists and move the whole hand slightly instead.
Related: flat, straight fingers reach badly. Curving them as though holding a small ball puts the fingertips over the keys rather than skating across them.
Practising only what you are good at
Ordinary English text is mostly common letters, which are the letters you already type well. A long session of general practice can be almost entirely repetition of things you can already do, which is why so many people practise regularly and improve slowly.
The letters costing you time are usually a handful out at the edges of the keyboard. Find out which ones they are, and practise those specifically — it does more in ten minutes than an hour of ordinary typing.
Try it
Take a one-minute typing test to see where you are, or drill the keys costing you the most time.
More: Average typing speed · How to type faster · Practice for beginners · Typing speed by age · The home row explained