5 Common Typing Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

Hitting a plateau in your typing speed can be frustrating. You practice and practice, but your WPM just won't budge. Often, the culprit isn't a lack of practice, but ingrained bad habits that are secretly sabotaging your speed and accuracy. These mistakes create inefficiency and strain, holding you back from your true potential.

By identifying and correcting these common errors, you can break through your plateau and become a faster, more comfortable typist. Here are five of the most frequent mistakes and how to fix them.

1. Looking at the Keyboard

The Mistake: This is the number one speed killer. Every time you glance down at your hands, you break your concentration, disrupt your rhythm, and lose your place on the screen. It makes touch typing impossible.

How to Fix It: Commit to not looking. It will be slow and frustrating at first, but it's the only way to build the muscle memory required for speed. Use a structured program that starts with the home row keys. Our beginner lessons are designed for this exact purpose.

2. Improper Wrist and Hand Posture

The Mistake: Resting your wrists on your desk or a hard wrist-rest, or bending them at a sharp upward angle. This puts immense strain on your tendons and can lead to pain and injury (RSI).

How to Fix It: Float your hands. Your wrists should be held straight and level, "floating" just above the keyboard. This encourages you to use your whole arm to move, not just your fingers, which is more ergonomic and efficient.

3. Using the Wrong Fingers

The Mistake: Relying on just a few dominant fingers (often called "hunt and peck") to do all the work. This forces your hands to move all over the keyboard, which is slow and inefficient.

How to Fix It: Learn the proper finger placement for each key. Each finger is responsible for a specific diagonal row of keys. Consciously force yourself to use the correct finger—especially your pinkies, which are often neglected but essential for keys like Shift, P, and Q.

4. Bottoming Out the Keys

The Mistake: Pressing each key with excessive force, all the way down to the keyboard base. This is a common habit for heavy-handed typists and it wastes energy and time, and can lead to finger fatigue.

How to Fix It: Practice typing with a lighter touch. Most keyboards register a keystroke long before the key is fully depressed. Focus on quick, gentle taps rather than forceful presses. This is especially important on mechanical keyboards.

5. Sacrificing Accuracy for Speed

The Mistake: Trying to type as fast as possible, leading to a cascade of errors. Every time you hit the backspace key, you're performing at least two extra keystrokes, which demolishes your actual WPM.

How to Fix It: Slow down. Make 100% accuracy your primary goal. When you can type a full paragraph without a single mistake, then you can begin to gradually increase your speed. Accuracy is the foundation upon which speed is built.

Ready to break your bad habits? Test your current accuracy and speed with our WPM Test and start building better habits today.