6 min read · Updated April 2026
The average person types at around 40 WPM. Fast typists — the ones who feel like they are barely trying — usually sit between 70 and 100 WPM. The gap is not talent. It is a small number of learnable habits they developed, often without formal instruction. Here is what separates them from the average typist, and how you can close the gap before your next Speedly score.
The single biggest unlock for most typists is full ten-finger touch typing. Even if you have been two-finger typing for years, switching to proper finger placement — both index fingers on F and J (feel the bumps) — will feel slow at first and then dramatically faster within weeks. Every other technique on this list gives diminishing returns if you are not using all ten fingers.
Glancing down at the keyboard breaks your reading flow and forces your brain to process two visual streams. Touch typing is designed around muscle memory — your fingers know where the keys are without looking. Force yourself not to look down. It will feel uncomfortable for a few sessions and then become automatic.
In Speedly, errors are penalised. More importantly, correcting errors — even with a quick backspace — disrupts your rhythm and costs far more time than the error saved. Most people who improve fast do it by first slowing down enough to make almost no mistakes, then gradually increasing pace. Speed without accuracy is noise. Accuracy at moderate pace becomes speed.
Fast typists are not reading the word they are currently typing — they are reading 1–2 words ahead. Their eyes and fingers are decoupled: eyes scan forward, fingers execute what was read a moment ago. This is a learnable skill. During Speedly practice, consciously try to keep your eyes one full word ahead of your current typing position. It feels strange initially and then becomes your normal mode.
Expert typists process common word fragments — "THE", "ING", "TION", "AND" — as single motor units, not sequences of individual keystrokes. You can accelerate this by deliberately practising the most common English words until they feel automatic. The top 200 most frequent English words make up roughly 65% of all written text. Get those feeling automatic and your everyday typing WPM will jump.
Tension in the hands and wrists is a speed limiter and an injury risk. If you catch yourself pressing keys harder than necessary or holding your wrists high above the keyboard, consciously relax. Your fingers should graze the keys with light pressure and return to the home row immediately after each keystroke. Hovering off the home row between keystrokes — even by a centimetre — adds measurable delay over a 60-second test.
Typing is a motor skill. Motor skills improve through consistent, spaced repetition — not through long single sessions. Ten minutes of focused typing daily will improve your WPM faster than an hour once a week. Speedly gives you a 60-second passage every day. That one session, done consistently, is a genuinely effective typing practice routine. Your WPM score in two months will not look like your score today.
Pick one technique from this list — just one — and focus on it during today's Speedly session. Do not try to fix everything at once. Motor skill acquisition works through deliberate focus on a single change, not shotgun attempts at all of them simultaneously.
A good place to start: technique 3 (accuracy first). Slow down by 10 WPM from your current pace and aim for 98%+ accuracy. Hold that for three days. Then gradually increase pace. You will likely find your ceiling is higher than you expected.
See also: Speedly: How to Improve Your WPM Without Trying Hard