GUIDES

Typing guides

Eleven pages on typing better: how to learn it, how to get past a plateau, why the same typos keep happening, and what actually matters about keyboards. Written to stand on their own, whether or not you ever play the game.

Start here

• How to learn touch typing as an adultThe finger assignment for every key, a three week schedule, and why your speed drops before it climbs.
• What is a good typing speed?The average is around 40 words per minute. What counts as fast, and how the figure is calculated.
• How to actually type fasterSix things that raise speed, starting with the one everybody skips.

Getting faster

• Stuck at 60 words per minuteWhy speed stalls where it does, and the different skill that gets you past it.
• Why you make the same typos every dayTransposition, substitution and same-finger pairs. Each has a different fix.
• Typing numbers and symbols without lookingThe number row has no bump to find it by. Learn the digits as offsets instead.

Hands and hardware

• Typing ergonomics without the folkloreThe three wrist postures that cause most typing injuries, and the desk height that fixes them.
• QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak comparedWhat each layout changes, and whether switching is worth it.
• Do mechanical keyboards make you type faster?No. Here is what they do change, and how the three switch types differ.

At work

• What typing speed do jobs actually require?Data entry, transcription, support and admin, plus what employers measure besides speed.
• Typing practice for programmersWhy prose practice does not transfer to code, and which keys cost developers most.

About these guides

These pages are written for people who want to type better, not for people who want to read about KEYSTORM. Where a guide mentions the game it is because per key measurement is genuinely the thing being described, and every one of them is useful if you never play it at all.

Two ideas run through the whole set, because they matter more than anything else. The first is that an error is expensive: finding it, deleting it and retyping costs several times the keystroke it replaced, so accuracy buys more than speed does. The second is that broad practice cannot reach a narrow problem, because the letters you are worst at are by definition the ones that turn up least often in whatever you practise on.

If you want the rules of the game rather than typing advice, how to play and game modes cover that.