What a plateau actually is, and how to tell one from a bad week
Progress is noisy enough that most 'plateaus' are nothing at all. Here is where we draw the line, and why we refuse to answer sometimes.
Typing speed does not improve smoothly. It improves in steps, with long flat stretches between them, and the flat stretches feel like failure while you are inside one.
Most of them are not plateaus. They are ordinary variance being read as a trend.
The noise floor#
The same person on the same day will produce results five to eight words per minute apart depending on the passage, how recently they ate, and whether the text happened to contain their weak pairs. Three sessions is not a sample. Three sessions is a mood.
Typepace fits a damped trend across your history rather than comparing your last run to the one before, and then it applies two refusals.
- A slope under 0.05 words per minute per day is reported as no trend at all. It is inside the noise.
- A fit with an R² below 0.2 is reported as no trend either. The scatter is larger than the pattern, so any line through it is decoration.
- Nothing beyond 180 days is forecast, because no honest model of a human skill reaches that far.
So what is a real one#
A genuine plateau is a flat fit that survives those tests: enough sessions, low enough scatter, and a slope that is genuinely near zero rather than merely uncertain. In practice it takes two to three weeks of consistent practice before the question can even be asked.
When one does show up, it is usually not a general ceiling. It is a specific bottleneck — a handful of pairs, one weak finger, or a habit like looking down on numbers — holding the average while everything else has already improved past it. That is why the plateau alert on your dashboard arrives attached to a drill rather than to encouragement.
Why we would rather say nothing#
It would be easy to always produce a forecast. Users like forecasts, and a confident wrong number is rarely challenged. We would rather show you a blank space and the reason for it, because the moment the coach starts inventing trends to fill a card, none of its other numbers are worth anything either.