Life on the Mississippi

This text as typing material

Length

158 words

Characters

907

At 40 WPM

272 s

Letters per word

4.6

Shift presses

20

Punctuation marks

26

907 characters count as 181 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 272 seconds and 60 WPM in 181. Its words run 4.6 letters long, 67% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 20 capitals and 26 punctuation marks (periods, commas, hyphens, colons, semicolons). The longest word is “drainage-basin”, and the less common letters J, K, V, X all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 84 of them and easier than 26 — demanding going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.

Public domain: Life on the Mississippi was first published in 1883, and everything published in the United States before 1930 is in the public domain there. The passage is cut by script from Project Gutenberg ebook #245, source file pinned at SHA-256 91388a58a49f. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.

Where to go next

• Mark Twain · 1876

  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

  Same author

• Agatha Christie · 1920

  The Mysterious Affair at Styles

  One step harder

• Alexandre Dumas · 1844

  The Count of Monte Cristo

  A gentler one

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.

• Key drills

  A drill for each row, hand, finger and kind of character — and how much of English prose each set of keys actually carries.

• 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.