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arenasnow25 karma

I taught myself to type accidentally when I was 3 or 4 years old using a DOS application called CPT Personal Touch-Typing that came out in 1985. It is so old it predated Mavis Beacon. I reached 83 wpm on that game when I was 6 years old (http://seanwrona.com/typing1991.jpg) and 108 wpm when I was 10 (http://seanwrona.com/typing1995.jpg). Once I had my first computer with Windows 95 on it, I never used that again really and stopped using typing games in general, but I still continued to improve. My dad had a Windows-era typing game that unfortunately I can't remember the name of when I was 16. That game did not let you type faster than 199 wpm, but I was getting 199 wpm often enough that I think I was already hitting 200 sometimes then.

As for online competitive typing, it didn't really exist much before 2008 except for Intersteno (which really only the people who competed in the live contests in Europe knew about) and the websites TyperA and Typing Zone, which were both pretty obscure. I was first introduced to typing through a bunch of embedded Facebook apps in 2008. There used to be a ton of those and now almost none of them exist. My high school classmate Jordan Nott, who himself was also niche famous for suing his college after they expelled him (http://www.bazelon.org/nott-v-george-washington-university/) posted a link to a Facebook game called Facebook Typing Speed. I joined it on a whim in 2008 and was startled to find that Jelani Nelson and I were consistently 20 wpm faster than anyone else on the game. I knew I typed faster than anyone I met in my real life, but I didn't KNOW a lot of people, see? I figured in the abstract there were tons of faster people and I still do think that but I can't name any. Because it was linked to my Facebook profile, people started contacting me and telling me about all the other games.

arenasnow24 karma

I started writing in 2017 and I took many breaks, so this is going to be much slower than a lot of people wrote other books. Yeah, I know you were joking.

arenasnow20 karma

You should see whether you are struggling more on speed or accuracy. If you are stagnating on speed, that means you are probably focusing too much on speed and should be typing a bit more aggressively. You should start trying to accelerate on any words 3-7 letters long that do not require you to repeat a letter or especially move any of your fingers. People think the fastest words are the most frequent words and to a degree that's true. 85 of the 100 most frequently used words in the English language are above average in speed on QWERTY, but they aren't the fastest words. The fastest words are usually 4-5 letter words that you can type in one singular motion, as if you are playing a chord on a musical instrument.

arenasnow20 karma

I think it's TypeRacer. Intersteno 1-minute and 10-minute tests are probably a little too long unless you're already really dedicated. Nitro Type doesn't allow you to correct your errors, which a lot of beginning typists like but I find mildly annoying. 10FastFingers has very few words with capitalization and no punctuation, and practicing those is essential for typing IMO.

arenasnow19 karma

My average speed on TypeRacer lately has been about 184 wpm. I have improved from about 164 wpm in 2010. When there's an upcoming competition on TypeRacer, I'll usually do 50 races a day on TypeRacer, which takes me about a half hour. That has always been my happy medium between racing too little to build up speed (it generally takes me a few races to build up to my average speed), and burning out by racing too much.

For Intersteno, I seldom ever train in English because I don't think I need to, but I usually try to do at least some practice in each of the foreign languages, where I need to build speed up more to be competitive (especially the Eastern European ones, which have lots of accent marks.)