Touch typing vs hunt and peck: what actually makes you faster

If you type with two fingers and you are wondering whether learning the proper method is worth it, the honest answer starts with a number that will disappoint both camps: in the largest study of modern typing, formally trained typists were about five words per minute faster than untrained ones. Not double. Five.

That figure is real, it is measured, and it is also the wrong thing to decide on. The average conceals what actually separates a fast typist from a slow one, and it is not the number of fingers on the keys.

What the largest study of typing found#

In 2018, researchers at Aalto University and the University of Cambridge published an analysis of 136 million keystrokes from 168,000 volunteers typing in an online test. It remains the broadest picture we have of how people actually type on computer keyboards rather than on typewriters.

Participants reported whether they had taken a formal touch typing course. The comparison between those two groups is the closest thing to an answer this question has.

The paper describes the five-word difference as “relatively small”, and reports its effect size as 0.27 — a gap you would need a large sample to see at all. The fastest typists in the dataset passed 120 WPM. For comparison, the professional typists studied on typewriters in the 1970s and 80s ran at roughly 60 to 75 WPM.

Why the gap is smaller than every article tells you#

Search this question and you will find confident ranges: hunt and peck at 40 to 60, touch typing at 80 to 100 and beyond. None of the pages quoting those numbers say where they came from, and several of them sell typing courses.

The measured gap is smaller for two reasons worth understanding before you decide anything.

• An average is not a ceiling. Trained and untrained typists overlap heavily — both groups had a standard deviation of about 20 WPM, which is four times the difference between their means. Plenty of untrained typists in that sample were faster than plenty of trained ones.
• Training is not practice. Somebody who took a touch typing course at school and types for twenty minutes a week is counted as trained. Somebody who has written code for ten years with six fingers is counted as untrained. The label records what you were taught, not what you have done since.

The thing that actually predicts speed#

The same study looked at what correlates with typing fast, and finger count is not the strongest answer. Self-reported finger count correlates with speed at r = 0.38. One other behaviour correlates at r = 0.73 — nearly twice as strongly.

It is called rollover: pressing the next key before you have released the last one. Slow typists in the study used almost none. The majority of fast typists used it on 40 to 70% of their keypresses, with the strokes overlapping by around 30 milliseconds and sometimes as much as 100.

That is what the two-fingers-versus-ten framing misses. On this evidence, speed tracks having more than one finger already in motion more closely than it tracks how many fingers are available at all.

The study measured keystrokes, not eyes, so what follows is the mechanism its numbers imply rather than something it tested: overlapping two presses means committing to the second before the first has landed, which is difficult while you are waiting to watch the first arrive. Breaking that habit, and what the first fortnight of it feels like, is its own piece.

So should you switch?#

Two questions decide it, and neither is about words per minute.

• How much do you type? Short bursts — messages, search boxes, the odd email — and five words per minute across your day is nothing you will ever notice. Full working days of writing, coding, transcription or data entry, and the ceiling matters more than the average.
• Do you want your attention back? This is the part the speed comparison hides. Typing without looking frees your eyes for the screen, which is the difference between writing a sentence and assembling one. Trained typists in the study also left fewer errors uncorrected, at 1.02% against 1.23% — though the paper calls that difference small as well.

If you type for a living, the case is strong, and it rests on headroom rather than on the average: the top of this dataset runs past 120 WPM, and the typists up there are overlapping keystrokes through most of a sentence. If you do not, the honest answer is that you can stay where you are and lose very little.

If you do switch, the order matters#

The mistake that makes people give up is treating it as a speed problem. It is a map problem first. Your fingers have to know where the keys are before they can start overlapping, and until that is true you will be slower than you were.

Expect that. Taking the crutch away exposes every key your fingers never learned, so the first week is worse than your current speed and the second is roughly level. Accuracy returns before speed does, which is the order you want — the arithmetic behind why is its own argument.

Learn the map before you drill for pace: our chart of which finger owns which key is the reference, and the free course works through it in order, home row first.

Find out where you actually are#

Before deciding, get a real number rather than a guess. Take a timed typing test and note three things: your speed, your first-attempt accuracy, and your consistency.

Consistency is the one to watch here. It compares your speed word by word rather than across the run as a whole, so a test made of bursts and pauses scores lower than a steady one at the same average. It is not a rollover measurement, which would take timing between individual keystrokes. What it does catch is the hesitation that comes with hunting for a key, and if your speed is respectable while your consistency is low, you are getting there by hurrying between keys rather than by overlapping them. That is the gap the proper method closes.