Top row typing practice

These keys, measured

Keys

10

Share of English letters

50.8%

Words needing nothing else

100

Fingers involved

8

Reach up, type, come straight back — these words never ask you to go below the home row. These 10 letters carry 50.8% of every letter in the 111 books behind the practice texts here — 26,423,442 presses out of 51,993,314, E alone accounting for 12.5%. 100 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 top row and 8 fingers.

to · it · you · were · we · or · out · up · your · two · our · too · yet · put · quite · poor · true · pretty

The set spans one row: the top row. In the course these keys arrive in lesson 10, lesson 9, lesson 6, lesson 7.

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.