Why accuracy comes before speed

Everyone who learns to type wants to be faster. The counter-intuitive part is that the quickest way to a high speed is to stop chasing it for a while and type accurately instead.

What a mistake costs

A wrong keystroke is not one error. It is the wrong key, then Backspace, then the right key: three keystrokes for one character. At 60 wpm that is a full second lost per mistake, and the stall breaks the rhythm that fast typing runs on. Ten mistakes in a minute of typing, which is 96–97% accuracy on ordinary prose, cost you around a sixth of your speed.

What a mistake teaches

Worse than the time is what the mistake trains. Every time you hit a key, your hand records the movement that got there. Hit it wrong and you have recorded a wrong movement. Push speed before the movements are right and you practise the wrong ones faster. Typists who plateau at 50 wpm are usually not slow; they are fluent in a set of bad reaches that they now have to unlearn.

The 95% rule

A useful gate: do not increase speed on a set of keys until you can type them at 95% accuracy or better. Below that, slow down. This feels like going backwards for a week. It is not. The speed returns on its own once the reaches are certain, and it comes back higher than it left.

A trainer built for learning gates each step this way, on accuracy first and speed second, never on time spent. (Keycap's Levels do.)

Where the mistakes are

Overall accuracy hides where the problem is. Two typists at 96% can be losing that 4% in completely different places: one on the left pinky (Q, A, Z), the other on the punctuation past L. Averages do not tell you which.

A per-key record does. It shows, for each key and each two-key pair, how often you got it right. Once you can see that ; is at 80% while everything else is at 98%, the practice writes itself: drill ; until it catches up, and stop drilling the keys that were never the problem.

Slow is a skill

Deliberately typing below your top speed, with no errors, is harder than it sounds and it is where improvement lives. A good practice run at 45 wpm and 100% does more for you than a frantic one at 70 wpm and 90%. The first is building; the second is rehearsing what is already wrong.

Common questions

What accuracy should I aim for when typing?

Hold 95% or better while learning a key set, and expect 97–99% once you are fluent. Below 95%, mistakes cost more time than the extra speed is worth.

Does correcting a mistake count against accuracy?

The wrong keystroke counts. The Backspace and the retype usually do not lower accuracy further, but they cost time, which shows up as the gap between raw and net wpm.

Why do I make more mistakes when I try to type faster?

Because the movements for some keys are not yet automatic. Speed exposes every reach your hand still has to think about. Slow down until those reaches are certain and the speed follows.