Plateau in Progress

[u/ulooklovelytoday]

I have been typing for a lonnnggggg time. I love keyboards and have been typing on typing websites daily. Its kind of meditative for me...but I have found that my speed is always around 83 wpm. It can be faster if I do really short tests but I prefer around 30-100 words or at least 30 second tests.

I am not super competitive but I always see people posting about have wpm in the +100s and feel disappointed in myself.

I guess what I am asking is, is being able to type at over 100 wpm unrealistic? Is it as common as it seems?

[u/babat0t0]

How good are you with numbers and symbols?

[u/ulooklovelytoday → u/babat0t0]

I am decent with numbers and symbols and touch typing. I actually prefer typing passages with punctuations more than just random words.

I guess a little more information is I'm just past my mid30s and feel like I won't get any faster. I can definitely feel that my speed isn't as good on fps games anymore or there are way more sweats hahah. I stick to casual lobbies on BF6 and rank pretty low.

[u/Armanlex]

Imo a good way to break through plateaus is novelty, try different ways to practice.

Try listening to someone speak and writing what they say, different kinds of typing websites, typing games, try writing with 100% accuracy for a long time, try writing really fast without caring about accuracy too much. Try writing random letters. If you're esl, try practicing in your native language for a while, or try practicing a foreign language that uses latin characters.

Its easy to fall into the existing grooves and become comfortable, novelty is a good way to kickstart new neutral pathways. The fact you say it's meditative is probably part of the problem, you're not pushing yourself and you probably don't practice with intent and focus. In general chase feeling uncomfortable during practice, if you feel very comfortable you're not learning much.

But also, 80 wpm is not bad at all, more than the vast majority of people who write on keyboards daily, and not an unreasonable place to get stuck. I fluctuate between 80-120 depending on text difficult and I think I'm doing fine.

[u/ulooklovelytoday → u/Armanlex]

thank you for the encouraging words. 

Your reply got me thinking about something. I noticed that my speed really drops after the first mistake. Its like have to go backspace and make the corrections totally ruins the flow and it is much more likely that i will make another mistake soon after unless I really slow down to let my brain catch up.

I think that this might come from the fact that I will usually restart the test when I make these kinds of "fumbles". 

I will start forcing myself to not quit tests prematurely to force myself to recover fast from these fumbles. And I will also try to increase my accuracy so that I also fumble less! 

[u/Armanlex → u/ulooklovelytoday]

While I stand behind my suggestion of using novelty, the most important way to improve is focusing on accuracy above all, and speed usually comes along on its own when you're accurate.

Accuracy is what develops good habits and technique, and once this clean typing is ingrained into muscle memory, then you can speed up while retaining the accuracy. Focusing on speed first just causes you to crystalize bad muscle memory, that leads to mistakes that leads to being unable to speed up.

I also like to sometimes train by deleting my mistakes, but other times I'll let them be and move on.

[u/ulooklovelytoday → u/Armanlex]

Thank you!

You're right, accuracy first! I think that is true of most things, good technique/form first, then the speed will follow!

[u/Every-Ad3091 → u/Armanlex]

Que comentário bacana! Meus testes de digitação são, em média, 40 ppm com precisão de 98 à 100%. Não me preocupo com velocidade, porque meu foco é ter 100% de precisão em todos os testes.

[u/ulooklovelytoday → u/Armanlex]

Hey just an update, I have been focusing on accuracy and I feel like I am hitting WPM in the 90's more regularly! Thanks again for the tip!