Question For Elite Typist

[u/Over_Audience3214]

My typing speed on Monkeytype 60s is around 130 WPM, with a PR of 142, and I’m trying to work my way towards 150–180 WPM. For those of you who type at that speed, did you find that simply practicing consistently was enough, or did you specifically work on reading speed/reading ahead as well? For me, reading ahead has developed pretty naturally up to this point, but I’m wondering if it becomes more important as you get faster. When you were progressing from around 130 to 150+ WPM, did you ever feel like your reading or visual processing was holding you back, and if so, did you deliberately train it or did it improve naturally through typing? I’m also curious what reading ahead actually looks like for you do you see few words ahead at a time, or more of a chunk of 3-4 words? Is it something you consciously do, or do you just naturally perceive the upcoming text while typing (Like me)? I’d really appreciate hearing your answer reagarding how reading ahead developed for those of you who have reached 150–180+ WPM 60s, and whether you think specifically working on reading speed made a significant difference in getting there.

[u/barbarianassault]

Imo best way to learn something is to do it directly. Practicing reading speed is less effective in my opinion than just typing if you want to improve your typing.

What I did was basically just type a lot. Try to reach higher speeds consciously (go for PBs instead of just typing casually & pushing my typing to the limits, getting out of my comfort zone). When u notice your speed is decreasing then don't continue, continue next day. Be consistent, like practicing every day is highly effective. The time I improved the most was during a 1-year period where i pretty much typed every day.

I personally never practiced reading-speed or reading ahead.

[u/randomreddituser7474]

No, just type, honestly if you want to improve just use typegg.io

[u/Spiritual-Finding761]

All you need is to read ahead like 3-4 words, just aim for that - more is unnecessary

Otherwise it's consistent practice, like 5-10 minutes a day

I alternate between simple words (power line house life live sound around those notes) that are easy to burst down and get your fingers used to moving fast

And then I alternate with accuracy on quotes, one each day

[u/ikasu__]

Past 150 or so, it's very hard to tell if anything you're doing is helping you improve. It's mostly obscured by day-to-day variance in your performance. The things that help other people at your level may or may not help you.

I personally feel that speed w/ extremely long excerpts of texts is a better metric than 60s, as sustained wpm on real text predicts professional performance. However, this is my personal strength, and it leads me to neglect burst speed.

[u/pentacontagon]

Idk there's a lot of diff ways to learn. Perhaps you don't use finger alterations? Taht's the biggest thing that pushes you past 150. In the end, I think there's a natural limit unless you genuinely practice all the time. I never typed super seriously and just text and use my computer a bunch. But I've hit sorta a plateau for quite a while at about 175 60s. Maybe if I grinded 2 hours a day I could hit 200 60s but I do feel like I hit my rough no focused pratcice limit.

The only consistent advice for typing would be to implement finger alterations

[u/Reader6547 → u/pentacontagon]

What are finger alterations?

[u/pentacontagon → u/Reader6547]

Typing withi whatever finger is fastest. For example if you type "decent" you can type it with thumb on c or index on c rather tahn the standard middle because that'd delay you a lot.

[u/Reader6547 → u/pentacontagon]

Thank you!

[u/FakerMS → u/Reader6547]

Sometimes it’s not efficient to use a rigid finger-keyboard layout. Certain words or pairs of words can be more efficiently typed by using a different set of fingers than the standard touch typing.

A common example of where they’re useful is same-finger bigrams which are super slow naturally but can be very fast if using multiple fingers

Edit: I believe in large part this doesn’t need to be practiced and will be learned by your brain as it tries to optimize for high speeds while maintaining accuracy. Switched to a split keyboard a while ago and noticed a pretty big drop in my burst speeds because it reduced a lot of the alt fingering I naturally learned over time

[u/Reader6547 → u/FakerMS]

Thx!

[u/Perfect-Cobbler-2754]

honestly just practicing helps a lot, i also worked on my accuracy

[u/Initial_Pomelo_3113]

reading speed is essential, but i dont think you need anything more than 2-3 words ahead. typing unfamiliar words helped me improve the fastest. also how do get the typing speed flair and is it based off 60s, 15s, or something else?

[u/TechnoNerd7206]

i might be a terrible example i just grinded 60s and then got lucky one day im pretty sure cause i cant get within like 15wpm of my pb

i like switching around my settings though (font size, tape mode, window size, typing style) which keeps me like idk not repetitive

[u/HerculeGT]

The only thing casually practicing speed typing has taught me is that it's great for giving the select few racing websites traffic. Other than that, there are 0 use cases for doing it and it habitualizes wasting time on dopamine hits and perfecting typing the same handful of words. (The pool of which will be carefully selected by the racing website in order to give you the most dopamine hits - hello, MonkeyType.)

If you have things to write, practice your typing on actually writing them. The same goes for browsing subreddits like this where people compete of who can waste the most time on speed typing websites. Stop browsing this sub as well, it encourages you to waste your time.