> I guess it's useful sometimes to know how to engage the 40wpm "actually get every character exactly right without even looking at the cursor" mode to transcribe documents.

Just thinking about this makes my spine straighten and my fingers "get ready" to go to the home row :p

We must have used the same application at my school. Though I think I eventually got to 75wpm with no mistakes (or whatever was allowed by the program--three mistakes a minute sticks in my mind but who can remember). It served me well. I live-LaTeXed my lecture notes and homework in college.

I unlearned the habit of backspacing to my mistake, correcting, and retyping. That has served me well.

I wish we had spent more time on accurately typing \ | ( ) , [ ] { } etc.† It would help me now as I still make simple mistakes with that. On the other hand, it only would've been useful to a handful of us.

† In fact, thinking about this brought up the very nostalgic memory of buying C++ for Dummies and the first program listing in it having a vertical pipe character. I had never seen it, and thought it was an ell at first. Well, that didn't compile, so maybe it was a 1? I didn't know! And the listing in the book had an unbroken pipe but my keyboard had a split one, so I couldn't tell these were the same character.

Eventually, I hit every key on the keyboard and then went back through them pressing shift until I found the right character! That was a feeling of enlightenment!