Capitals typing practice

These keys, measured

Keys

26

Capital letters

2.21% of prose

Turns up

once in 45 characters

Fingers involved

10

It is the reach that costs people the most speed and nobody practises it. Counted over the 111 books behind the practice texts here, capital letters come to 1,475,269 of 66,792,973 characters — 2.21%, or one every 45. Often enough that a test of bare lower-case words is leaving out a fifth of the job.

Other drills

Keep going

• Typing test

  Gross and net WPM, accuracy and keystrokes per hour — the figures typing exams use, at eight lengths from 15 seconds to 15 minutes.

• Typing lessons

  Fifteen short lessons, two new keys at a time, with the keyboard showing which finger goes where.

• Practice texts

  Type a passage from a classic book: real sentences, capitals and punctuation, with the numbers that say how hard each one is.

• Every key

  One page per key: the finger that owns it, how often it is really pressed, and the letter pairs it lives in.

• Typing speed

  What a speed means in characters, keystrokes per hour and minutes per page — and a test paced to the number you are aiming at.

• Weak keys

  A drill built from the keys you miss most, worked out from your own tests.

• Times tables

  Each table with its patterns, a drill that returns to what you got wrong, and a 60-second speed test.