Typing speed improves fastest when you stop practising typing and start practising the parts you are bad at. The order that works is: fix accuracy first, then attack your worst letter pairs specifically, then raise pace under mild pressure. Practising general passages faster is the most common approach and the least effective one, because it rehearses what you can already do.
Almost everyone stalls somewhere between 45 and 70 WPM. The cause is rarely finger speed. It is that a small number of transitions - specific letter pairs, punctuation, capitals, numbers - cost far more than the rest, and normal practice barely touches them.
Typing an ordinary English passage, you will hit the pair "th" constantly and the pair "qu" almost never. If your weakness is in the rare pairs, a thousand more passages will not find it. Meanwhile the strong pairs get faster, the weak ones stay slow, and your average stops moving.
This is why time spent does not predict improvement well. People who have typed daily for twenty years are frequently stuck at the speed they reached in year two.
The 2018 Aalto and Cambridge keystroke study found something that contradicts most typing advice: self-taught typists using six or seven fingers were often as fast as formally trained ten-finger touch typists. What predicted speed was not finger count but consistency - using the same finger for the same key every time, and keeping hands close to the keys.
Short and frequent beats long and occasional. Typing is a motor skill, and motor skills consolidate between sessions rather than during them. Fifteen minutes daily will outperform two hours on Sunday, comfortably.
Stop when accuracy starts falling. Practising past that point rehearses the errors and is worse than stopping.
With fifteen focused minutes a day, most people see accuracy stabilise within a week or two, and a measurable speed gain within four to six weeks. Progress from 40 to 70 WPM is realistic over a few months. Progress past 100 WPM is a different project, and it is mostly about eliminating the last few unreliable transitions rather than getting broadly faster.
Improvement is not linear. Expect a flat stretch after the first gain - that is the point where accuracy work is quietly repaying, before it shows up in the number.
With about fifteen focused minutes a day, accuracy usually stabilises within one to two weeks and speed gains become measurable in four to six weeks. Moving from 40 to 70 WPM over a few months is a realistic goal; progress slows considerably above 100 WPM.
Try not to, but do not treat it as the primary problem. Glancing down costs time and breaks rhythm, yet the larger cost for most intermediate typists is inconsistent finger assignment - using different fingers for the same key on different occasions.
Accurately, without much ambiguity. Practising at a speed where you make frequent errors rehearses the errors. Type slowly enough to stay above 95% accuracy and let speed follow.
Yes, for one specific thing: holding technique under pressure. They are poor substitutes for targeted drills, because they do not concentrate practice on your weak transitions - but they surface which transitions collapse when you cannot slow down.
Marginally at best, and mostly through comfort rather than speed. Key travel and actuation force change how typing feels and can reduce fatigue over long sessions, but they do not address the transitions that limit your speed.
Daily, briefly. Fifteen minutes a day beats two hours once a week, because motor skills consolidate between sessions rather than during them.