Common Typing Mistakes Begginers Do

By Dotyping TeamMon Dec 29 2025

Typing faster is like a smooth glide, but its not a easy journey that we can achieve through just random typing test practices, we need to find out what mistakes are we doing and how we can avoid them while build a smooth curve of our typing speed.

Fast typing or we should say typing in a constant rhythm without making much mistakes, feels like a breeze . As a beginner whether you initially type at whatever WPM, you need to understand few thumb rules to learn typing faster without messing around so the learning curve can be smaller. In this post I have discussed about the most common mistakes that I personally did and have seen people doing while chasing speed.

Hand and Finger Position

Take this seriously, without proper hand posture and ergonomics, your hands and fingers just won't glide over the keyboard which will directly affect your keypresses and slows you down. You will need to find a hand posture that you can comfortably hold without much efforts or getting tired, while you can also access the keys. Try to put the hand at the center of that main typing keys on your keyboard and glide your fingers over the keys without pressing them to see if your fingers can access those far letters or not.

Once you will get your hand placement position right, you covered the very first step and ready to move ahead and type all those first letters, though with less WPM for now but eventually getting there where you want.

Right Finger Placement

There is a rule to type faster, because you must have typed for a while on the keyboard with no proper finger placement and your maximum speed would must be about 30-40 or max 50 wpm and with no proper rhythm, that is why the rule to put fingers on properly on the home row is there in the keyboard world. Before moving ahead or just typing enough to develop a muscle memory put your both hands fingers on correct keys so that as your practice you will develop a good muscle memory which will help you excel in typing without rewiring.

Use correct finger to type.

You may had your old way of typing on the keyboard may be you had typed using 2 or 3 fingers or however was you typing so far will have some bad finger usage. This will make your finger go there when you are starting to type properly. So try avoiding those fingers to move on those old keys that you were pressing.

You will need to rewire your old way into the proper way to press the key with a particular finger, so that you can cover the whole are properly without jumping or moving your hand over and over again to reach far keys or jumbling around.

Here is the key guide that you need to click using which of your finger.

Left hand

Pinky: Q A Z (also usually 1, Tab, Caps, Shift) Ring: W S X Middle: E D C Index: R F V and T G B (index handles two columns)

Right hand

Index: Y H N and U J M (index handles two columns) Middle: I K , Ring: O L . Pinky: P ; / (also usually 0, -, =, [ ], Enter, Backspace, Shift)

Don't chase WPM

In order to achieve a good wpm, you always to need to make sure that you make less mistakes, This means when your accuracy is nice above 97%, you will already be heading to achieve a good wpm as you practice. At start you will make a lot of mistakes and don't stress about it, you make see a accuracy rate of about 80-90%, but that is what you need to focus on fixing first. So in short don't and don't skip this part this is the most important.

Why accuracy is most important

Try typing a long word in one go, and then make few mistakes and fix it and then make other mistake and fix it, you will see a drastic change comparing the smooth typed and a messy typed (low accuracy one). so similarly it applies to typing speed as you type much bigger words or sentence, take your time and hover the correct key before hitting it when you are confused about the key you are going to press ahead.

Don't chase the speed initially

When you starts to type, don't instantly chase or decide how much wpm speed you have to get soon. Your typing speed will take its time to reflect in your typing, and will eventually shows up but no at day 1 or day 10 or even day 100, you will get better as you continue to type over time, this may take some days to even few months.

Also while you starting out focus on putting your finger tip on the right key before hitting it. So that you make less mistakes and don't get frustrate over correcting a single character multiple times. In short focus on accuracy first and the speed will come up as you build muscle memory.

Don't type too much or get tired

Yes the feeling to get better in few days will come, where you want to achieve a great wpm or at least a better wpm speed on few days, but accept that, it wont be happening. This is going be a quiet a journey where you need to focus on getting better a little day by day.

So hitting your 1 hour or 3 hour daily practice wont help you much, this will just make your wrists tired and your accuracy to drop. Build a minimal time to practice daily like from 10 min to 30 min a day is okay, or you can also try practicing after a while like 5 min after each hour. This wont tire your wrists and will eventually help you building a routine for practice.

Dont go hard mode as a beginner

While you type normally a email, a note, a daily diary you will need punctuations, numbers and other symbols for sure, but when you are starting out you need to go slow and let your fingers get familiar and build a good muscle memory of letter keys. This just not build you a initail confidence you need to continue your journey but also let you type medium or hard level sentence with puntuations and number even faster than normal.