Most learners plateau not because they're practising too little, but because they're practising the wrong way. The five mistakes below are the most common reasons typists stay stuck under 40 WPM. Run a baseline test on tapwpm.com first to see which symptoms show up in your own data.
Symptom
You break eye contact with the screen several times per sentence.
Fix
Cover the keyboard with a cloth during drills so glancing becomes impossible. Within 1–2 weeks your fingers will learn to find keys by feel alone — the foundation of touch typing.
Symptom
Stronger fingers reach for keys assigned to weaker ones, e.g. left middle finger pressing C (assigned to left index).
Fix
Slow down and follow the canonical finger map. If you've built years of bad muscle memory, expect 1–2 weeks of slower typing before the new mapping sticks.
Symptom
Your raw WPM looks great but corrected WPM is 15–20% lower, and the gap never closes.
Fix
Drop target speed by 20% and force 95%+ accuracy. Corrected WPM penalises errors heavily, so removing mistakes almost always lifts the headline score more than pushing raw speed.
Symptom
Wrists ache after 10 minutes; shoulders creep up toward ears; speed falls off a cliff in longer tests.
Fix
Feet flat, elbows ~90°, wrists floating, screen at eye level. Posture isn't cosmetic — a cramped body fights itself on every keystroke and caps your top speed.
Symptom
Letter WPM is great, but any text with commas, quotes or digits drops your speed by 30%+.
Fix
Add a Tapwpm punctuation or numbers drill to your routine twice a week. Real-world typing is rarely pure letters — most jobs demand punctuation fluency equal to letter fluency.
Most of these mistakes trace back to one root cause: never learning the canonical home-row position. If you haven't already, work through the home-row typing guide for absolute beginners first — it gives the finger map and posture rules that make mistakes 2–5 impossible to fall into. Then move on to the full how-to-type-faster playbook for a structured daily routine. For making the new habits stick, see our typing practice tips.
Looking down at the keyboard. It feels safer but breaks the muscle-memory loop that touch typing depends on. Cover the keyboard during drills and the habit disappears within 1–2 weeks.
Slow down and follow the canonical finger map for 1–2 weeks even if it feels slower than your old hunt-and-peck. Bad muscle memory only unlearns when the new path is reinforced enough times to override it.
Because you're no longer letting typos slide. This is healthy — corrected WPM penalises errors heavily, and removing mistakes almost always lifts the headline score more than pushing raw speed once accuracy is ≥ 95%.
Ready to test your skills?
Take a typing test on tapwpm.com — Tapwpm records every mistyped character so you can see exactly which keys and patterns are holding you back. Then work through the fixes above and re-test in a week.
Jump into the Tapwpm homepage test and get a baseline with full per-key error data in 30 seconds.