O Pioneers!

This text as typing material

Length

180 words

Characters

997

At 40 WPM

299 s

Letters per word

4.4

Shift presses

9

Punctuation marks

27

997 characters count as 199 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 299 seconds and 60 WPM in 199. Its words run 4.4 letters long, 64% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 9 capitals and 27 punctuation marks (commas, periods, hyphens, semicolons, quotation marks). The longest word is “dwelling-houses”, and the less common letters J, K, Q, V, Z all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 20 of them and easier than 90 — gentle going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.

Public domain: O Pioneers! was first published in 1913, 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 #24, source file pinned at SHA-256 0bc23f5b9167. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.

Where to go next

• Willa Cather · 1918

  My Antonia

  Same author

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 1866

  Crime and Punishment

  One step harder

• G. K. Chesterton · 1911

  The Innocence of Father Brown

  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.