How to dramatically improve your typing speed on an iPad (or make your typing more accurate)

The iPad's on-screen keyboard is pretty good and is perfectly adequate for typing short to medium amounts of text. But there's a feature built into iOS 11, iOS 12, and iPadOS that, if you know how to use it, can dramatically improve your typing speed. Or, it's a feature that you currently find hugely annoying but don't know how to turn it off

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Take a look at the iPad's on-screen keyboard for a moment. Notice the smaller symbols above the main characters on some of the keys (like the ampersand above the F)? Ever wondered how you get to them? 

You're not alone. Or maybe you're finding yourself activating them while typing, but not sure why.

The feature is called Key Flicks, and how you access the symbols is quite simple -- if you know how! You simply press and flick the key down.

Yeah, that simple. And once you get used to it, it can make typing a lot faster and smoother.

Note that Key Flicks isn't present on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, and on that larger device, you slide the key up.

However, some people -- especially those who use the Apple Pencil -- can find this annoying because of how easy it is to flick downwards accidentally.

Fortunately, you can turn this feature off. Go Settings > General > Keyboard and turn off Enable Key Flicks.

Easy.

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