Learn / Chapter 2 · Purist
Where your speed actually goes
By the end of this chapter: Read your own key matrix and bigram data, name the specific keys costing you the most, and turn that into the next drill instead of guessing.
Chapter one dealt with the habit that caps your speed. This one deals with the measurement problem underneath it: you cannot fix what you cannot locate, and a single words-per-minute number is designed to make locating anything impossible.
Why does WPM tell you so little?
Because it is an average, and averages hide exactly the thing you need. A 70 WPM session is not 70 WPM spread evenly across every key: it is most keys at 90 and a handful at 25, and the slow handful is doing nearly all of the damage. Improving the keys you are already fast on changes almost nothing, which is why practising more of the same rarely moves a plateau. The whole point of per-key data is to find the small set of keys that are actually setting your ceiling.
What is a key matrix, and how do you read one?
It is median latency and error rate for every key, aggregated across your sessions. Read it by looking for the outliers rather than the pattern: two or three keys will be conspicuously slower or more error-prone than their neighbours, and those are your targets. A key that is slow but accurate is a travel or finger-assignment problem. A key that is fast but wrong is a confusion with a neighbouring key. Those two need different practice, which is precisely why one WPM number cannot tell you what to do.
The rest of this chapter
Five more sections, and the drill
Reading a bigram weakness score, using the error taxonomy to tell a rhythm problem from a confusion, what consistency and rollover are really measuring, what your own errors have cost you in keystrokes, and how to turn all of it into the next drill.
This chapter is part of Purist, along with the data room it teaches you to read. Chapter one stays free, and so does the trainer: every mode, every layout.
See what Purist includes →Not read chapter one yet? Start with accuracy before speed, which is free and is the foundation this one builds on.