What should I be looking at while typing?

By tsumauchi - updated: 5 years, 6 months ago - 3 messages



I have a 75 wpm average, and this seems like a wall I can not surpass, I'm not sure what to improve next. Accuracy is my priority task, since I try to speed up making mistakes all the way.

I've been trying to improve my speed, but I'm not really sure what should I do next. I've started focusing more on accuracy to avoid mistakes, seeing improvement, but I still struggle through the typing process.

When doing the Reading to Typing process, what are you looking at? The word itself or each letter contained? does this matter? What I am trying to figure out is where should I be looking at while typing?

Thank you! I'm sorry if I didn't explained well enough! Cheers!
By user724289 - posted: 5 years, 6 months ago

I sound out the word in my head as it helps me know what I am supposed to be typing at that current moment.
By csquared22 - posted: 5 years, 6 months ago

I find that as I get better and better at typing, I'm not typing letters, I'm typing words or even entire phrases. That is to say, I read a passage, and in my head, I have 3 or 4 words at a time that I'm typing through. I think it is some form of pattern recognition.

This is why I am far, far faster at typing in English than in any other language, or in 'nonsense' languages designed to make your fingers feel numb afterwards.

When you are typing something that you are reading, try typing in 'chunks'. Read several words, and then type them out, try not to pay too much attention to individual letters. If you find yourself making mistakes a lot with a particular word, practice that word enough until you can 'chunk' it. That is, practice it until you can type that word without having to think about how that word is spelled.

When you say a word, it has a certain 'feel' as it comes out of your mouth, your tongue just moves in a certain way to enunciate the word. Given enough time, typing can feel the same as speaking. Words just have a 'feel' to them.

When you type out your password to your computer or a website, something you do every day, you probably have done it so many times that you no longer need to worry about the exact arrangement of the letters anymore. It just feels natural. For words that give you a lot of problems, repeating them over and over can help you to chunk those words into phrases, so that you can type faster.

"The man walked with his cat".

When I type out this phrase, do I have to pay attention to the exact spelling of each word, and think about how my fingers will move for each word? Not in the slightest. The words spill off my fingers in chunks, something like this.
"The man" "walked with" "his cat".

This is also why you'll find that longer words may start to trip you up. This is because you can no longer easily 'chunk' the word---you actually have to slow down your reading to pay particular attention to the spelling of the word.

"The extraterrestrial individual indiscriminately muttered unintelligible garbling."

Unless you've practiced some of these longer, more complex words a lot, you'll find it a lot more difficult to simply 'chunk' them. When I type this phrase, it goes something more like this:

"The extra" "terr" "estrial" "indiv" "idual" "indis" "criminately" "muttered" "unin" "tellig" "ible" "garbling".
You can see that some words I was able to 'chunk' entirely, while others were complex enough that when I typed them, I had to slow down enough to get the spelling right. This can also occur if the same couple of fingers need to do a lot of work for typing a particular word.

Which brings us to the next thing that will help your typing speed: reading. Yes, of course reading. We've already established that you can start to type faster if you 'chunk' words. But how can you chunk words that you don't know the spelling of? Reading more will increase your spelling proficiency, which will in turn allow you to chunk more words, and do so faster.

Other advice: sometimes you can't pay "too" much attention to accuracy. Oh, I'm sure there are cases where some jobs demand letter-perfect typing. For people who need to be employed in such professions, I wish you all the best in your journey for 100% accuracy in typing. However, I would argue that the MAJORITY of people seeking to type faster simple want to do so in order to save time. And fortunately for folks like you and I, word processors like Microsoft word, or even browsers like Google Chrome or Firefox, all have built-in spell-checks that will save you a lot of time, if you have the occasional spelling or typo error. With tools like these to easily point out the occasional mistake, I find it to be counterproductive to aim for '100% accuracy'. While high accuracy is valuable (fixing too many mistakes will take longer than if you'd typed perfectly in the first place), perfect accuracy can cause you to slow your typing down enough that you actually end up LOSING time.

Try practicing typing as fast as you can now and then, to mix in with your 'high accuracy' typing. Decide on what amount of error you are comfortable accepting in your pursuit of faster typing speeds, such as 5%. If you can hold your self to 95% or higher accuracy, try pushing your fingers to move faster and see what you can accomplish. You may be surprised at how much you had been holding yourself back in your pursuit of 'perfection'. Perfection is overrated sometimes!

Finally, keep your fingers nimble. If you need to type for a long time, take breaks. Stretch out your fingers, flex them a bit. Try to avoid popping your knuckles too much though, that can start bad habits. And I find that one thing that really helps me is to go run my hands under WARM water for up to a minute (or soak them in a small container of warm water) while flexing and massaging your fingers. I have noticed truly incredible speed gains when my fingers are very warm---I had no idea how much my typing speed was being hampered by the coldness and stiffness of my joints. Your body's extremities cool off quicker, and this can cause shivering and loss of speed and accuracy when typing with cold fingers. Keep the surrounding temperature comfortable, and occasionally go warm up your fingers when they get too stiff.

Hope this helps. Cheers!
By tsumauchi - posted: 5 years, 6 months ago

Thank you very much! These advices will help me through my process! I was trying different things, I would struggle and didn't know what it had to be done! This has opened new paths and I'll start correcting my bad habits!
I really appreciate this!