Weakness drills
Passages generated from your lifetime keystroke history, weighted toward the keys and transitions that cost you the most.
Why repeating typing tests stops working
Most practice is a whole test, taken again. The trouble is that a test is mostly made of the keys you are already good at — the common letters of English, in the proportions English uses them. Take fifty tests and you will have typed e thousands of times and q perhaps twice. The keys costing you the most are the ones you get the least practice at, which is why a plateau after the first few weeks is so common.
A drill inverts that. It is built from the keys and transitions your own history says are slow or unreliable, so the practice is concentrated exactly where the time is being lost. The passage is harder to type than a test, and that is the point.
How a weak key is identified
Every key gets a Key Flaw Index between 0 and 100, combining two different failures: how often you get it wrong, and how long you hesitate before it.
Errors — 65% of the score
Weighted heaviest because a wrong character is unambiguous. There is no interpreting it: you meant one thing and typed another.
Hesitation — 35% of the score
The softer signal, and the more interesting one. It surfaces the keys you can hit correctly but have to think about — the ones costing you speed without ever showing up as a mistake.
Both are discounted by how much evidence sits behind them. A key needs roughly 8 attempts before its rate is trusted even at half strength, so one fumbled z in a single attempt cannot outrank a key you have genuinely struggled with forty times. This is the difference between a diagnosis and a scoreboard: without that discount, the drill would chase noise.
What a drill is actually made of
Real words, chosen because they are dense in your target keys, mixed with short pattern blocks that isolate the mechanic. The ratio matters: the passage is mostly real words, with a pattern block interleaved regularly rather than stacked.
An all-pattern drill would look like more focused practice and would train the wrong thing — a metronomic rhythm that does not survive contact with ordinary prose. Words teach the key in the context you will actually meet it; blocks give the fingers the repetition. You need both, in that proportion.
How to practise so it sticks
- Slow down until the errors stop
- Speed follows accuracy, not the other way round. Typing a drill fast and wrong rehearses the mistake — you are practising the error as diligently as the correction.
- Short and often beats long and rare
- Ten minutes daily moves a weak key faster than an hour on Sunday. This is motor learning, and it consolidates between sessions rather than during them.
- Do not watch the WPM while drilling
- A drill is deliberately harder than a test, so the number will be lower and that means nothing. Judge drills by whether the target keys stop appearing in your diagnosis, and judge speed on a normal test.
- Let the targets change
- A key that leaves the list has been fixed. Re-running the same drill after that is practice spent on a solved problem, which is how the plateau starts again.
Common questions
- How do I type faster?
- Stop practising what you are already good at. Ordinary typing practice is dominated by common letters, so the keys costing you the most time get the least attention — which is why speed plateaus. Find the specific keys and transitions that are slow or unreliable, drill those until they are not, and let the overall speed follow.
- Are typing drills better than typing tests?
- They do different jobs. A test measures where you are; a drill changes it. Taking more tests is measuring more often, which is not the same as improving — most people who plateau are testing frequently and practising narrowly.
- Why is my speed lower on a drill than on a test?
- Because a drill is deliberately built from your weakest keys, so it is harder than ordinary text by design. A lower number on a drill is the drill working, not a regression.
- How long does it take to fix a weak key?
- Usually days rather than weeks for a single key, with short daily sessions. Motor learning consolidates between sessions, so ten minutes a day moves faster than an hour once a week.
- Do I need an account to use the drills?
- No. Your history is stored in your own browser and analysed there, so the drills are personalised without anything being uploaded or any account existing.