The faster you can type, the better. Here is one technique that dramatically improved my typing speed.
Type as if you absolutely must not make a single mistake
The technique is simple: type with the intention of making absolutely no mistakes. That may sound obvious, but think about how often you actually mistype. People who can touch-type reasonably well often stop worrying about mistakes and assume they can just press Backspace.
I used to type that way too. I thought speed mattered more than a few errors. Then I tried a typing-practice program—I no longer remember which one—that required me to backspace and correct every mistake. With my usual mistake-tolerant style, my score would not improve at all.
Accurate but slower typing produced a better result
When I deliberately tried not to mistype, my typing felt dramatically slower—perhaps half as fast.
Yet even at that seemingly slow pace, I immediately scored higher than I had while typing quickly and making lots of mistakes.
One typo can cost as much time as more than ten correct keystrokes
That was when I realized that a single typo can cost as much time as more than ten correct keystrokes.
It makes sense when you think about it. A mistake interrupts your rhythm. You stop, reach for Backspace, move the cursor back, and spend at least a second producing no correct input at all. Correcting a typo feels trivial, but the accumulated cost is substantial.
Mistakes also tend to happen in the middle of a word, which makes it harder to resume. Sometimes you erase correctly typed characters as well just to get your rhythm back. Of course that slows you down.
When your speed returns without the mistakes, productivity can nearly double
As I kept typing with accuracy as my priority, my speed naturally recovered. Eventually I could type at my old pace without the errors. I tested myself with several typing programs and found that my effective input speed was nearly twice what it had been in my typo-heavy days. Nearly double—that is a huge difference.
So if you make many typos, you may also have plenty of room to improve. Allow yourself to type slowly at first and concentrate on accuracy; your effective typing speed may rise dramatically.
