Focus on Accuracy?
By garmfellow - updated: 3 years, 1 month ago - 7 messages
Lately I've been plateauing at around 90 or so wpm and so I've been mixing my style and form up to hopefully get better results. One of the tips I encountered was to invest in a mechanical keyboard, so I picked one up from Amazon for about $60, but the travel distance and pressure necessary to activate the keys is throwing me off. Should I start practicing with 100% accuracy with low WPM (like 50-70), or what else can I do to break through this plateau?
You're right, I shouldn't give advice when I am slower than the person asking. How about you give some advice then? I see you are @ 133 words per minute.
By galantix - posted: 3 years, 3 months ago
Focus on accuracy and have some patience. You can definitly force to break you plateau otherwise, but this will ruin your progress in the long term. Try to not make a mistake (but finish the qoute if you make one) and go as fast as you can while avoiding mistakes.
By hacker - posted: 3 years, 1 month ago
Ok Mr. 81 words per min
By galantix - posted: 3 years, 1 month ago
You're right, I shouldn't give advice when I am slower than the person asking. How about you give some advice then? I see you are @ 133 words per minute.
By smokemifugottem - posted: 3 years, 1 month ago
Screw that man. I know for a fact that sometimes a different perspective from someone around your level (80 vs 90 wpm is not a massive difference) can be really helpful.
By galantix - posted: 3 years, 1 month ago
Thanks man. I also think we should focus on the positive and help each other. I wish Hacker would use his time to give advice instead of this.
By nautiusmaximus - posted: 3 years, 1 month ago
If you survey those with high WPM averages, you'll see that they also tend to have high accuracy. Now, I know correlation doesn't imply causation. However, I know that hitting the backspace key to fix mistakes doesn't make you go faster. So, hitting the right keys to begin with seem like a good approach.
By suikacider - posted: 3 years, 1 month ago
It kinda depends - if you check my profile, you'll see that my WPM/accuracy is all over the place.
When I've gotten my fastest scores (197, 192 and 186) I wasn't focusing on accuracy. I was just throwing caution to the wind and got lucky with quotes that fall nicely under my fingers. The downside is that if you're always spitballing it, you're going to get a few nice scores but mostly lower average scores. 180 words per minute is 15 characters per second... if we take an average human's reaction time as being 0.3 seconds, that means I've already typed ~5 characters. So now I hit delete a few times and start up again a second later -- that single mistake tanks my score by 50 WPM.
So the other approach is to focus on accuracy by paying attention to your fingers and staying within a speed that's manageable for you -- you'll have less impressive standout scores but a higher average score.
IMO the key to typing is being able to do both -- speed up when you've got an easier string of characters in front of you, slow down when you've got a harder one.
