The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

This text as typing material

Length

133 words

Characters

698

At 40 WPM

209 s

Letters per word

4.1

Shift presses

9

Punctuation marks

26

698 characters count as 140 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 209 seconds and 60 WPM in 140. Its words run 4.1 letters long, 65% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 9 capitals and 26 punctuation marks (semicolons, periods, commas, quotation marks, hyphens, colons, apostrophes). The longest word is “service--she”, and the less common letters J, K, V, X all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 42 of them and easier than 68 — ordinary going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.

Public domain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was first published in 1876, 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 #74, source file pinned at SHA-256 74d77384b123. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.

Where to go next

• Mark Twain · 1884

  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Same author

• H. G. Wells · 1895

  The Time Machine

  One step harder

• James Fenimore Cooper · 1826

  The Last of the Mohicans

  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.