How quickly can accuracy improve?

Targeted drills often produce a one to two percentage point gain within a week, and moving from 92% to 97% over a month is realistic with consistent practice.

Should I do accuracy drills before or after speed practice?

Before. Drills work best on fresh hands, and doing them first sets the standard for the rest of the session.

Typing Accuracy Drills That Actually Work

Six specific drills for reducing typing errors, with instructions on when and how often to use each one.

General practice improves accuracy slowly. Targeted drills improve it quickly. Here are six that address specific failure modes — use the one that matches your error pattern rather than all of them at once.

1. The zero-error restart

For: general carelessness. Type a short passage with one rule: any error means starting over. Cap the session at 10 minutes so it does not become demoralising. Two or three sessions is usually enough to reset your standard.

2. Home-row re-seating

For: substitution errors from hand drift. Type ordinary prose but deliberately re-seat both index fingers on the F and J bumps after every single word. Slow, boring, and highly effective within a week.

3. Slow rhythm typing

For: transposition errors (teh, adn). Type at roughly 60% of your normal speed with a strictly even cadence. The goal is that no keystroke is faster or slower than any other. This retrains the hand that races ahead.

4. Weak-key word lists

For: persistent errors on specific keys. After each session, note the three keys that caused most errors. Build a short list of words containing them and type it as tomorrow's warm-up. Repeat until they leave your top three.

5. No-backspace endurance

For: exam tests that disable corrections. Type for the full test duration with corrections forbidden. Measure uncorrected accuracy — this number, not your corrected accuracy, is what the exam will see.

6. Punctuation and capital drill

For: the 2–3% accuracy drop most typists show on formal text. Type passages dense with commas, full stops, apostrophes, quotation marks and proper nouns, using opposite-hand shift throughout.

How to schedule them

Pick one drill per week based on your dominant error type. Run it for 5–10 minutes at the start of each session, then practise normally. Rotating drills weekly keeps them effective; doing all six daily makes each one shallow.

Measuring whether it worked

Test accuracy over a five-minute passage at the start and end of the week, at the same time of day. A 1–2 percentage point gain in a week is a good result and compounds quickly.