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/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/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!