Practice texts·gentle going
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James, 1898. 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
- 181 words
- Characters
- 963
- At 40 WPM
- 289 s
- Letters per word
- 4.2
- Shift presses
- 14
- Punctuation marks
- 26
963 characters count as 193 exam words, so 40 WPM finishes it in about 289 seconds and 60 WPM in 193. Its words run 4.2 letters long, 66% of its letters need a finger to leave the home row, and it asks for 14 capitals and 26 punctuation marks (commas, periods, hyphens). The longest word is “convenience”, and the less common letters J, K, V, X all appear. Among the 111 texts here it comes out harder than 22 of them and easier than 88 — gentle going, by word length, punctuation and reaches together.
Public domain: The Turn of the Screw was first published in 1898, 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 #209, source file pinned at SHA-256 171afa184a54. Project Gutenberg's own header, footer and trademark are not reproduced.
Where to go next
L. Frank Baum · 1900
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
One step harder
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 1866
Crime and Punishment
A gentler one
Gaston Leroux · 1910
The Phantom of the Opera
Next in the list
Keep going
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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.
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A drill for each row, hand, finger and kind of character — and how much of English prose each set of keys actually carries.
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