Besides knowing the keyboard and using the right fingers to hit keys, you must have patience and use special techniques. Regarding patience, you must hold down a Shift key long enough to capitalize a letter then release that key before typing the second letter of your word. Regarding using special techniques: To type certain words such as "because" and "meal", thrust up the fingers on your left hand first in order to avoid hitting the E key before you can hit the B key or M key. When typing "the", thrust up the 2nd finger on your right hand and thrust up the 4th finger on your left hand while going for the T key with the 2nd finger on your left hand to avoid typing h-t-e or t-e-h.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. What do you mean by "flip up"? In the case of the word "the," you're talking about moving fingers that don't come into play while typing that word.

While keeping your right wrist planted on your desk, raise the second finger on your right hand and the fourth finger on your left hand while hitting the T key with the second finger on your left hand. When typing "the", you need to lift the second finger on your right hand so that you don't hit the H key before you can hit the T key and you should raise the fourth finger on your left hand so that you don't hit the E key immediately after you hit the T key.

I share speedy's confusion about your instructions, todd. "The" is typed with left index: T, right index: H, left middle finger: E. I see no merit in raising fingers you're not actually using.

As for giving you tips, speedy, I'm a bit at a loss to be honest. If you're typing all day, every day, and have that been doing for years, I can't see how you could not have progressed beyond 40 wpm to be honest. When I first learned touch typing, I was beyond 60 wpm in less than two weeks.

Since you've only completed 1 single typing test on this site, there's really not enough data to tell what might be holding you back. Are you making a lot of mistakes that you have to fix? Are hitting the wrong keys, or are you hitting them in the wrong order? Do you still have to think about moving each individual finger to a certain key when typing, or can you type without thinking about individual keys?

I do make mistakes and end up having to backspace a lot.

Please give my tip a try. I have learned to use this trick to counter the tendency to type h-t-e or t-e-h for "the" words.

I'd advise you to peruse this thread in the forum, there's a lot of valuable information in there: http://www.keyhero.…

Probably the most useful tip for you in there will be focusing on accuracy. Making a lot of mistakes is an indicator for going faster than your movement patterns allow, and going back to reprogram them to be more accurate will help your speed progression.

You should probably slow down a bit until you can keep a consistent accuracy of at least 95%, then practice, still focusing on accuracy. When your accuracy has improved to 97-98%ish, you should be able to go faster again, but try never to fall below 95%. Since you have already typed so much in your inaccurate ways, this will probably take a lot of time, but I don't think there's another way if you're really set on improving your speed in the long run.

@Todd: I think your 'method' is inefficient and needless. Judging from your speed and accuracy here on the site, it isn't helping you either. Although there's really insufficient data to be sure, you don't seem to be an above-average typist. You have completed a whole of 2 test on this site, yet think it a good idea to go to the forums and give adivce to people that are just as fast as you are? I'd advise you to practice some more, and ditch the finger-lifting schemes.

It's quicker to lift fingers and avoid erring than it is to mess up, go back to correct your mistake then proceed during a typing test. I have made progress thanks to developing new techniques and am willing to pass on what I know. It's up to you all what you do with it.

if you have got stuck at forty wpm then you need to try racer games or better yet a game where something is going to eat you. It will make you type faster. The thing is it sounds like you have gotten into a habit. Also everyone is different and not everybody can type at 90-120 words a minute. So don't stress about it. Though you should be able to do 50 - 60wpm with practice. Try a game where you are being chased and typing the same paragraph over and over. Do it little and often and you will eventually get faster, and break through your barrier. Once you have done this then you will get faster with your regular typing.

Typing the same paragraph over and over can help you but you will get more mileage overall by doing a lot of different exercises.

What's helped me over the years, to go from 60wpm to 100-120wpm with spurts to 180wpm sometimes:

Typing the same passage repeatedly shows you what it feels like to go increasingly faster, like with the amount of time and pressure you spend on each key. Slow and fast typing just feel different. Speed feels lighter. Then you try to be "light" by not pressing as hard or as far and try to use the audible information to up the rhythm. I call this "fluttering".

This doesn't mean you can't also learn to focus on vertical lift of fingers to gain motor memory "pistoning". I had to learn this in the 1980s on the older clackety keyboards, and as travel distance shortened over the decades, I've adapted to more fluttering. I am trying to keep the old skill alive though, by using a 1950s mechanical typewriter every now and then. Love it!

Once you gain experience in those sensations, how keys feel differently when you are fluttering through the keys, vs the old typing sensation of before, then you can focus on typing new things.

Typing new things is important because you want to train motor memory for letter combination patterns in words. Then you don't type letters anymore, but entire words, without thought to the smaller parts. Your hands just deliver the word. It might help to actually perceive typing in that way: motor memory trained on words, and then later with practice, sequences of words.

It helps to trust your fingers to type the word you've read, and enough so, that you read ahead to 3-4 future words while you let your hands execute the previous. It's like hopping on one foot while rubbing a circle with a hand on your abdomen.

With practice fluttering, reading ahead, and motor memory recall of words and sequences of words, not letters, you find yourself not thinking as hard about what you're doing, and you discover a peaceful zone while the madness on the keyboard is happening.

Speaking of letter combinations, if you say what you need to type in your head, it can make you more comfortable and less likely to mess up. For example, it helps me to say i-c-i in my head if I have to type a word such as "delicious".

Hi Speedy2686, I have the same problem. I have been practicing and practicing. I use typeracer also. I have picked up some speed but still making mistakes. I practice everyday. I do say the letters to myself as I go and that does seem to help also. I am about at 55 - 60 wpm but I know I should be faster with as much practice as I have. Plus still mistakes. Seems like I have some sort of block or something. I think I am stuck in some bad habits with my fingers, I raise them to high and then end up hitting the wrong key. So frustrating.

When you raise fingers, you only need to raise them about an inch above the keyboard.

An INCH? What the hell? 2 - 4 millimeter is all you need!

Really... i'm starting to think this guy is intentionally trying to spread misinformation.

Mr. Hicks, please stop i can't read your comments anymore man. I am 27 years old and when i was in 6th grade we took a typing class and that is all we did, and with me being a drummer for 23 of those 27 years i had a bit of an advantage in my typing class and on average i used to type up to 120 wpm but also back then we were taught to never leave mistakes and back space and fix your error, which is definitely 100 percent the way to go, but i got up to 150 wpm with just leaving them but we were also typing what seemed like short novels and were tested differently than this system does but still, my fingers literally rest on all the keys i know my fingers are going to hit. It may just be a personal preference for me but like someone mentioned above with actual advice that once you get really good at typing which takes practice and not typing for your job, actual skills practice and lessons is the practice i am referring to. I just found this site and am looking into getting my skills back and my WPM back to at least 120 again which as you can see I'm pretty rusty, but as i type this with my fiances computer, which doesn't auto capitalize like mine does hence my grammatical capitalization errors and why I am using hers, but I am trying your so called technique and I must say it drastically causes my WPM to go from 79 to about 40 so i believe your solution is actually a problem, and again I may be wrong and it just may be my personal preference to keep my fingers on keys, but my hands seem to have a mind of their own when I'm typing and I actually have gotten to where i do not even hear, say, or even visualize the word. Me being a drummer i see patterns and rhythms. For example the word People gave me many problems because your pinkie tends to be the weakest link in typing, so instead of focusing on the letter placement i actually hear, see, and even visualize a drum rudiment called a Sixtuplet, which sounds like, Trip-a-let Trip-a-let, or 1 2 3 4 5 6, which if you listen to the Mamas and the Papas House of the Rising sun...the rhythm in that song or as us musicians call it the time signature of a song is Dun da dun de da dun or Trip-a-let Trip-a-let. So my advice after much ADD rambling to you mam is to buy a beginner drum book, look up drum rudiments and see if that helps, you will even catch yourself finding out what time signature most of your favorite songs are in, which most are in 4/4 due to it being the easiest and most fluid of all time signatures, unlike Rush which use several different time signatures in one song hence why Rush sounds just so......can i say Bad....no i won't go there. But PLEASE do not misinform due to a personal preference because you could possibly be setting someone up for a long and painful process of failure at typing. Merely recommend that the way you prefer MAY work for someone else. Thank you.....oh and it took me only 5 minutes to type this, now i suck at math but that's pretty good right?? I'm sure i have a lot of mistakes, but still....I still got it!

I'm just giving pointers to help people and I'm not going away. If you don't like my advice, just ignore it.

I would very much like to take this advice. I mess up the word "the" all the time, typing teh or hte. I even did it just now.

What do you mean by "flip up" the fingers. I think understanding this would help me a great deal.

What I mean by flip up is to thrust your fingers up while keeping your wrist planted - you don't have to lift your entire arm.

The best thing you can do is know the spelling of the word one hundred percent. I would work on your spelling, Piano lessons would also help the speed of your fingers. As for the finger thrusts.. I have no idea. practice makes perfect!

I like your answer, It is much easier to type something that is coming from your own head and not from reading. The mind is quick but from the mind seeing and the hands typing accordingly is a difficult feat. I can type 120 wpm from my mind with no mistakes but reading, I am average 96 percent and just under 70, especially if numbers and quotes are involved!

My advice would be to make a list of very common words and practice it over and over until it's pure muscle memory. Then repeat with another list of very common words. I've found that I can type my passwords extremely fast just form the amount of times I have to enter them. I imagine that you could carry this over to other words as well.

Also, maybe try typing with the instant death to improve your accuracy. It's helped me quite a bit.