Short answer: most people can add 10–15 words per minute in one to two weeks — but only with the right kind of practice. Generic typing games train raw speed on random words; they don't train the vocabulary, phrasing and sustained focus an actual IELTS Task 2 essay demands.
⏱ Find your current typing speed in 60 seconds →Most typing games optimise for one thing: how fast you can hit keys for short, simple, unrelated words. IELTS Writing asks for something different — long, structured academic sentences, correct punctuation, and the mental load of composing an argument while your fingers keep moving. A high score on a typing game doesn't reliably predict how you'll perform typing a real Task 2 paragraph, because the skill being trained isn't the same one being tested.
The highest-transfer practice is typing full, high-band Task 2 model essays against a visible clock. This does two things at once: it trains your fingers on genuine academic sentence structures and collocations, and it exposes you to strong Band 6–8 phrasing you can reuse in your own writing. You're not just getting faster — you're absorbing the language patterns that raise your Lexical Resource score along the way. That combination is what generic typing drills can't offer.
Before adding more practice volume, check whether one of these habits is silently capping you:
Any one of these can cost more speed than a week of extra practice would gain back.
It depends on how much time you have. Touch-typing — placing all ten fingers on home row and typing without looking — is genuinely faster long-term, but relearning your technique from zero takes months of consistent practice, and in the short term it makes you slower while your muscle memory rebuilds. If your exam is weeks away, it's usually better to keep your current style and fix the specific habits above rather than overhaul everything. If your exam is several months out, investing in proper touch-typing now pays off well beyond IELTS itself.
Pick one full model essay a day and type it against the clock, tracking your words-per-minute, accuracy and whether you'd have finished in time on exam day. Use a new essay each session rather than repeating the same one — retyping a memorised essay inflates your speed without building the skill, since you're no longer reading and composing at the same time. Rotating essays keeps the practice honest and closer to real exam conditions.
Practise with 156 real Cambridge Task 2 essays →Track your WPM trend across a week or two, not a single session — day-to-day variation is normal and one slow session doesn't mean you've stalled. Periodically retake a proper speed test and compare against the ~30 WPM comfortable benchmark for computer-based Task 2. Once you're consistently above it, typing speed stops being your limiting factor, and your remaining practice time is better spent on ideas, structure and vocabulary instead.
A high WPM number with a low accuracy score isn't actually progress — every mistyped word is a correction you'll have to make later, which eats back the time you thought you saved. Aim to raise speed and accuracy together: if your accuracy drops noticeably as your WPM climbs, slow down slightly until it recovers, then push again. Steady, controlled speed with high accuracy beats fast, careless typing every time on exam day.
Most people gain 10–15 WPM in one to two weeks of focused daily practice with real essays rather than random text.
They help raw finger speed, but don't train the longer sentences and sustained focus a real Task 2 essay demands.
If you know it in advance, yes — practising on a similar physical keyboard removes one source of exam-day friction.
Take a speed test built for IELTS pacing — above ~30 WPM, typing is very unlikely to be your bottleneck.
Typehush — practise typing high-band IELTS model essays for the computer-based Writing test. Take the speed test · Browse the model-essay library · How fast should you type?