Why should you care about your WPM?

Hello Charlie, in this article I will be talking about keyboard WPM and how to improve it.

For starters, what is WPM? This acronym stands for Words Per Minute and it is supposed to be a measure of a how fast you can type on a keyboard (the higher it is, the more words you can type in one second). 

After understanding its definition, you may be asking why should you care about this? It's precisely because of how useful can improving your WPM be in your life. Especially in the OIB, where we often end up getting a lot of written assignments (such as hot seatings, creative writing works, task works, essays, presentations, etc), students as a result often end up needing to type a lot. Otherwise, in your life, typing may concern your future job (especially as the world is becoming more and more digital), or even other subjects that you study at school, or probably taking notes in university. Hence, typing faster will be beneficial in these situations.

The average person has a typing speed of around 40 WPM (they can type 40 words every minute). So in theory, the actual time taken to type the words on the keyboard for a 1000-word essay would be 25 mins (this is excluding the time it takes to think about what to write). But if your WPM went up to 60, suddenly you can type the same thing that took 25 mins before in just under 17 mins. But people are capable of going way beyond this limit. A really fluent typist can type on average around 140-180 WPM, which is ridiculously fast (the previous 1000 words could now be written in 7 mins with a speed of 160 WPM instead of taking 25 mins to type those words!). 

So with these previous numbers, you can clearly see how typing quicker can make you much more productive and help you to save time. But to get quicker, the best way is to learn blind typing.

Indeed, the normal way that the average typist types is by constantly looking at their screen, memorising two to four words, then looking at their keyboards to type these words. This method is really slow compared to blind typing, which means that you type without looking at your keyboard and only look at the screen of the computer. Instead, you assign certain keys to each finger of your two hands, and you rely on muscle memory to know which finger you should use to type each letter. Below is a diagram for where each finger should be positioned:

For example, you should use your left index finger to type the letters r, t, f, g, v and b (all the orange keys). To quickly remember where to place all your fingers, you can feel for the tiny bumps on the letters f and j to know where to put your index fingers and then place all your other fingers in line with the two indexes. 

Over time, practising to type like this will allow you to practically double your current typing speed or even more. And practice, I would suggest websites like Keybr to learn to get the hand of blind typing as it gradually keeps adding more and more letters for you to type, until you can type all the letters of the keyboard without looking at it. It even shows you the accuracy and speed of each letter and its progressions in the form of a diagram so you can know which letters to really work on.

After that, I would also recommend Monkeytype to test your typing speed as you can do a quick 30s test to find out your current typing speed and you can keep repeating it until you get faster. What I really like about this website is its customization as it has plenty of themes, as well as having plenty of options to customize exactly what you want to appear on the screen.

Lastly, Type Racer is another website that is really useful to improve your WPM, especially because it's sort of competitive (as you have to race against other people online) and it includes capital letters as well as punctuation marks which is an additional bonus.                                               

So improving your typing speed could indeed be a good opportunity as it will allow you to do so many things much more efficiently than ever before!