PLATEAUS

Stuck at 60 words per minute

Getting to 60 is a matter of finishing something: the map from letters to fingers. Once it is built, more of the same practice adds nothing, because there is nothing left to learn. Getting past it means starting a different skill.

By Hiren Solanki Published 4 September 2026 Updated 2 October 2026

Why the plateau happens where it does

Getting from 20 to 60 words per minute is a matter of finishing something. You are still building the map from letters to fingers, every session adds a piece of it, and progress feels roughly linear because it is.

Somewhere around 60 to 70 that map is finished. You know where every key is without thinking about it, and more practice of the same kind adds nothing because there is nothing left to learn. The plateau marks the end of one skill, and getting past it means starting the next.

The different skill is mostly about three things: how much you type per decision, how consistent your rhythm is, and how much time you lose to corrections.

Stop typing letters and start typing words

At 40 words per minute you type letter by letter. Each keystroke is its own small act, and the ceiling is how fast you can issue them one at a time.

Fast typists do not do this. They dispatch whole chunks as one motion, the way a pianist plays a chord rather than four notes. Common words such as the, and, that and with become single gestures, and so do frequent endings like -ing, -tion and -ment.

You cannot force this, but you can practise the thing that produces it. Type the two hundred most common English words repeatedly, at a speed where you never miss, until each one stops feeling like a sequence. Those words are roughly half of all written English, so making them automatic buys back more time than any other single change.

Consistency beats peak speed

Two people can average 65 words per minute in completely different ways. One holds a steady 65 the whole way. The other alternates between bursts of 100 and stalls at 25. The second person is the more common case, and they have far more room to improve.

The stalls are where the time goes, and each one has a specific cause:

• A word containing one of your weak keys, where you hesitate before committing.
• A capital letter or a piece of punctuation that breaks the flow of the hands.
• An error, followed by Backspace and a retype, which costs several times the keystroke it replaced.
• Reading ahead failing, so you run out of text before your fingers run out of speed.

If your typing has a visible rhythm problem, working on peak speed is the wrong target entirely. Getting rid of the stalls raises your average without raising your maximum at all.

Do the arithmetic on accuracy

Assume an error costs you roughly the time of five keystrokes, which is conservative once you count noticing it, pressing Backspace and retyping.

The 80 wpm typist at 92 percent is slower in practice than the 65 wpm typist who never misses, and feels faster the whole time. That gap is where most plateaus actually live. If you are stuck, the first thing to measure is not your speed.

Look further ahead

Fast typists are reading several words in front of the one their hands are on. It is the same skill as sight-reading music, and like sight-reading it can be trained, though few people practise it.

The symptom of a short reading window is that your speed collapses on unfamiliar or technical text while staying fine on ordinary prose. If that describes you, practise on text slightly harder than you are comfortable with, the kind you cannot predict.

Find the keys costing you time

By this stage your remaining problems are specific and small, which is exactly why they are hard to find. A single slow key costs a fraction of a second, and no overall speed number will ever show you which one it was.

The usual culprits are the same for most people, because they are the keys the strongest fingers do not own: Q, Z, X, P, and anything requiring the little finger with Shift. General practice will never fix them, because ordinary text barely contains them. Per key timing is the only way to see the problem, and once you can see it the fix is usually a ten minute drill.

What to actually do this month

• WEEK 1Measure accuracy with corrections counted. If it is below 97 percent, everything else can wait.
• WEEK 2Drill the two hundred most common words at a speed where you never miss. Boring, and it is the single highest return exercise there is.
• WEEK 3Find your five worst keys with real measurement and drill those specifically.
• WEEK 4Type difficult text slightly beyond your comfort, to widen the reading window.

Where the real ceiling is

Most people who practise deliberately settle between 80 and 100 words per minute, and that is a comfortable place to end up. Above about 120 the constraint stops being your hands and becomes how fast you can read and think, which is why competitive typists train on text they have seen before.

Past roughly 80 the practical benefit flattens out. Very few tasks are limited by typing speed at that point, so the main reason to keep going is that you enjoy it. Where the numbers sit generally puts it in context, and the shorter list of what raises speed is the practical summary.