My Journey to Improve my Typing: Part Four

In the fourth part of my journey, I actually tried to work on my typing instead of just reviewing a website. I spent a lot more time typing and experimenting to actually get over all the difficulties I have. This round was way more focused on improvement.

I tried keybr.com earlier in the school year when finding different websites to research. When I had tried it then, I did not feel confident in my typing on this specific website, because it brought out a lot of my weaknesses. Since it challenged me, I assumed that it would be really efficient at helping me improve. 

When entering the website for the first time, there are a couple of pages of introductions to the website, how it works, and typing in general that greet the user. This website caught my attention the first time because of a specific algorithm it uses to come up with the letters to type. It starts off with the most common letters slowly adding in all the letters and keeping track of how accurate you are with each letter. It doesn’t give you real words to type but instead comes up with random words that still make sense phonetically. I immediately enjoyed this because I could get used to any combination of letters and not just popular ones. 

My mindset changed eventually because the made-up words seemed repetitive and I felt like it wasn’t enough. It was great for preparing me for typing, so when I switched to typing real words again, it was easier. Which is what I think the goal of the website is. The fake words aren’t a replacement for practicing the real ones, just a preparation. 

When I tried it again this time around it seemed a lot easier, and the more I used it, the easier it felt. The highest wpm I got probably the first time around was like a 33 with an infinite amount of errors, now it’s from 56-70 with a few errors. 

Since I was focusing more on improvement, I practiced by incorporating typing practice into homework I already had to do. I take Dual Credit English and have some long reading assignments. I also have a hard time prepping myself to read something I know is long. Something I know I can do without a mental block is typing. Fortunately, with this website, it has a really cool feature where you can add whatever text you want to practice typing. I would insert paragraphs I had to read for my English homework and type them out and then read them over again after I’d finished. It really helped me get the info in my head and made completing the reading more fun and achievable. I practiced with spaces and punctuation and everything this time and I actually got used to it and a lot better at it because I had really been struggling with that. 

Over the course of a few days, a curious thing happened which was that my wpm raised quite substantially. I was really surprised with how high my wpm was and considering that this whole reviewing of websites all conspired because of a website that deceived me into thinking I was a better typer than I was, I went back to typingtest.com to see if I would get the same wpm. 

I took a test there and got 48 and then went back to keybr.com and took a test and got 48 so I think it’s just the different words and tests I’m using that affect my speed.

With tests, it is lower because I don’t know what words are coming and they are all different but with my own practice from my homework it uses many words repeatedly so my muscle memory gets better with those specific words and the others from the regular tests surprise me, hence slowing my wpm. 

This website was definitely one of my favorites so far because of how much it helped me improve.