New plans for training typing speed

Where I’m at

When we last left off, I had concluded that my accuracy-first approach was misguided and switched to focusing on increasing my typing speed in my practice sessions. Specifically, I’ve been trying to type as fast as I can*, on typeracer.

In the past almost-two-weeks, I’ve done 154 samples / races, over the course of a little more than 4 hours.

So far, these are my results…

Just eyeballing it, this looks like no meaningful improvement. And statistically, the correlation between sample number and speed is 0.150.

I think it is fair to assume that whatever I’m doing, isn’t working. I don’t seem to be getting faster.

So, what do?

Some ideas

• Sometimes when I’m typing it feels smooth and flowing. Other times, I feel like I keep getting in my own way: i feel kind of jerked about as, rushing, I keep making transposition errors. One thing that I could do is practice, with the intention only of typing “smoothly” like that. I would hide the WPM reports, and after every sample, just evaluate how smoothly I was typing.
• I could practice specifically on difficult text that is apt to trip me up. I would back up and go slower, but gradually build up to a higher speed. Then I could see if this transfers to easier texts, so that I am typing faster overall.

I think I’m going to try doing that fist thing for 100 samples, and then see if it seems to be doing anything.

[edit 2020-04-13: Ok. I tried that, but it was too hard to evaluate if I had done it or not. I switched to just trying to maintain fluid-ness, and practice getting back into that mode when I felt rushed, but it was hard for me to maintain that intention.]