Home row typing practice

These keys, measured

Keys

10

Share of English letters

34.6%

Words needing nothing else

31

Fingers involved

8

Every word here can be typed without moving a hand. These 9 letters carry 34.6% of every letter in the 111 books behind the practice texts here — 17,987,637 presses out of 51,993,314, A alone accounting for 8.1%. 31 of the 8000 commonest words in the corpus can be typed without touching a key outside the set, and the drill is made of those. The set spans one row, the home row and 8 fingers.

had · as · all · has · shall · half · ask · ah · glad · glass · hall · fall · sad · ha · lad · add · alas · flash

The set spans one row: the home row. In the course these keys arrive in lesson 4, lesson 3, lesson 2, lesson 1.

One key at a time

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.