Practice texts·ordinary going
Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser, 1900. Type the passage exactly as written — capitals and punctuation count.
- Gross WPM
- 0
- Accuracy
- 0%
- Wrong words left in
- 0
- Keystrokes / hour
- 0
- Time
- 0 s
This text as typing material
- Length
- 154 words
- Characters
- 881
- At 40 WPM
- 264 s
- Letters per word
- 4.6
- Shift presses
- 12
- Punctuation marks
- 23
881 characters count as 176 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 264 seconds and 60 WPM in 176. Its words run 4.6 letters long, 63% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 12 capitals and 23 punctuation marks (commas, hyphens, apostrophes, periods). The longest word is “alligator-skin”, and the less common letters K, V, X all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 47 of them and easier than 63 — ordinary going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.
Public domain: Sister Carrie was first published in 1900, 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 #233, source file pinned at SHA-256 091801ae1f03. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.
Where to go next
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
One step harder
Wilkie Collins · 1859
The Woman in White
A gentler one
Stephen Crane · 1895
The Red Badge of Courage
Next in the list
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.
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A drill built from the keys you miss most, worked out from your own tests.
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Each table with its patterns, a drill that returns to what you got wrong, and a 60-second speed test.