How to Type 60 WPM: A Complete Training Guide
Achieving 60 words per minute is the gateway to professional typing speed. Learn the exact habits and training strategies required to reach and sustain 60 WPM.
Why 60 WPM is the Golden Benchmark
When someone asks you "what is a good typing speed?", the answer almost always hovers around 60 words per minute (WPM). This isn't an arbitrary number. At 60 WPM, a fundamental shift happens in how your brain processes text generation.
Below 60 WPM, typing is a conscious effort. You are thinking about where the keys are, correcting mistakes as you make them, and looking down at your keyboard. Once you successfully learn how to type 60 WPM, the process becomes fully automated. The thought of a word translates directly into finger movements without conscious intervention.
This speed represents the threshold where your fingers can finally keep pace with your train of thought, making it the minimum requirement for many professional roles, from programming to data entry and legal transcription.
The Death of Hunt-and-Peck
If you are currently stuck at 30-40 WPM, you are likely relying on visual feedback (looking at the keyboard) or using a suboptimal finger layout (like the classic two-finger "hunt and peck").
You cannot reach a consistent, comfortable 60 WPM without proper touch typing methodology. Touch typing implies that every key on the board represents a specific, mapped movement from the "Home Row" (ASDF JKL;). By eliminating the need to look down, you free up massive amounts of cognitive bandwidth.
Accuracy Before Speed
The most common mistake beginners make when trying to hit 60 WPM is to just force their fingers to move faster. This results in sloppy typing, frantic backspacing, and a wildly inconsistent rhythm.
To type fast, you must first improve your typing accuracy. Your goal should be 98% accuracy on standard text. When you make mistakes, the time spent recognizing the error, pressing backspace, and re-typing the sequence costs you significantly more WPM than simply typing the word a fraction slower in the first place.
Practicing at 98% accuracy ensures that you are encoding the correct motor pathways into your brain. If you practice at 90% accuracy, you are literally training your brain to make mistakes.
Developing Bigram Fluency
Once you know the keyboard layout without looking, the next step in understanding how to type 60 WPM is mastering "bigrams" and "trigrams."
A bigram is a two-letter sequence (like "th", "er", "in"). In the English language, these sequences appear constantly. Beginners type the word "the" as three distinct thoughts: T, then H, then E. A 60 WPM typist executes "the" as a single fluid motion of three fingers.
By training common bigrams and trigrams, you compress the cognitive load required to type. Instead of executing 5 individual keystrokes for a word, your brain executes 2 or 3 common "chunks". For a deep dive into this, see our article on increasing from 60 to 100 WPM.
Your 60 WPM Training Plan
Reaching 60 words per minute requires deliberate practice. Just typing emails all day won't cut it, because you aren't isolating your weaknesses.
- 1. Establish the Home Row: Make sure your fingers always return to ASDF and JKL;.
- 2. Slow Down to Speed Up: Type at whatever speed allows you to maintain 98% accuracy. Let the speed naturally increase as your brain builds the motor pathways.
- 3. Practice Daily: 15 minutes of focused touch typing practice every day will yield vastly better results than a 2-hour session once a week. Motor memory requires sleep to solidify.
- 4. Use a Performance Trainer: Use a tool that tracks your keystroke latency and identifies your weakest bigrams so you can drill them directly.
The journey to 60 WPM is entirely about building the right habits. Once you establish true touch-typing fundamentals, the speed will come naturally.