Exploring the Typing Journey: Achieving Consistency Over Speed and the Impact on Accuracy

It is nice that there is a touch-typing community here, especially for beginners like me, as we can come here often to talk about our typing journey. I give a lot of appreciation to my friend @olujay for coming up with the idea of creating this community.

Yesterday, I spent some time practicing my typing on Monkeytype.com, and the highest record I hit was 100 WPM with 100% accuracy, but the painful thing was that I did not screenshot this record because I thought I would be able to pass this record before I started feeling fatigue on my hands, but I was wrong.

While I was typing, I noticed that I made fewer errors when I concentrated on consistency instead of speed, and I have some screenshots here to show you for this claim.

This text above was what I was to type down. It is a total of 50 words and 263 characters, which I would have to type and then see my records, which contain my speed, consistency, and accuracy. This exercise is actually a repeated exercise in which I had earlier had a speed of 89.27 WPM.

When I repeated the test, I figured I was able to make 88 wpm and a 100% accuracy. This meant I didn't make any errors while typing and had a consistency of 81%.

If you don't understand what consistency means, this means the speed between each letter or word you type, i.e., the breaks you make, or more about your pace in typing. If they are of absolutely equal speed, you can get a consistency of close to 100%.

_{Talking about a consistency of 100%, this is something I have not gotten before. My highest yesterday was 91%, and I was not able to make the screenshot.}

Now see this screenshot that I just shared. You see that I am just 1 word faster than the former screenshot. With that difference, my consistency decreased by 2%. I think this time I was a little bit focused on the speed that I dropped really with consistency.

Here is what I think: if one is calm enough to build consistency, the speed increases over time, and the person will have it easy to maintain their speed levels.

I always try to remind myself that it is not always about speed; it is about being able to achieve better consistency with no errors. What is the essence of being very fast and leaving a lot of errors behind?

Here is another screenshot from another exercise, and this time, I chose to go way faster than I did earlier, and you can see what it did to my consistency. Apart from my consistency, I made more errors as my accuracy decreased to 95%. Indirectly, we can say that a good consistency level would bring about a high accuracy level.

So what did you learn from me today?