What Is Your Typing Speed on a Standard QWERTY Keyboard?

[Pythagorean]

As long as I'm wearing nose plugs...

Looks like a taco, smells like fish, tastes like chicken, and they say that you're not supposed to eat it...?

I think it's all good as long as you don't masticate

 

[Danger]

Unless, of course, one lucks upon a Masochist who likes to be masticated.

 

[Moonbear]

Just out of curiosity, was anyone else taught to type staccato, to music? My teacher played marching tunes such a Sousa. He taught us to work like a 3-round-burst Baretta. (Type about 5-8 characters per second, pause for 1/4 or 1/2 second, then take another blast at it.) We were also taught to treat each character individually, rather than a whole word at a time. To this day, I spell out the words as I type them.

I wasn't taught that way, but it sounds like a good way to avoid typos. I think it would be easier to type by letter when typing up something written by someone else than when you're composing from your own thoughts. When I'm typing my own thoughts, I'm thinking words and typing letters...not at all sure how my fingers know what they're doing. But, if I were to attempt to type from someone else's handwritten notes, yeah, it's probably safest to just look at each character than try to read each word. I'm sure that was really important in the days when everyone had a secretary to type stuff for them, and the boss might be using technical terminology that the secretary wouldn't know, so just type the letters. (I have heard some funny stories of words being mistyped throughout an entire disseration because the typist couldn't read someone's handwriting or didn't know the term so assumed it was something else more familiar...other than the stress of having to have your entire dissertation retyped, it sounds like an amusing version of Mad-libs...at least some 30 years later these folks are looking back and laughing at it ).

 

[Joma Frand]

IIRC typing WPM is based on a standard average word length of 5 characters.
So multiplying WPM by 6 (counting the space) gives characters per minute.

If you're doing shorthand the word length is shorter, so you should be able to type more words.

I don't know what the standard shorthand word length is.
Without that information a comparison is meaningless.

edit to add quote

Yes, this is true. But if you look up the program "All The Right Type", which is the image that I posted, you'll see it is not in shorthand, but normal text.

 

[280Z28]

30wpm right now with strictly-proper touch typing :)

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=150292

 

[Alkatran]

I take this test every once in awhile and always score around 100 wpm. That's all good and great, but how useful is this test, really?

I almost never come across cases where I need to blindly copy words from a page to a computer, so what's the point of measuring my typing speed on that type of task? I know I can't think up text to write at 100 wpm, so what does it matter that I type that fast?

To make matters worse, the majority of my typing is programming! Not only is this a creative process, but a lot of the time is just me trying to get where I need to type!

 

[Moonbear]

I take this test every once in awhile and always score around 100 wpm. That's all good and great, but how useful is this test, really?

I almost never come across cases where I need to blindly copy words from a page to a computer, so what's the point of measuring my typing speed on that type of task? I know I can't think up text to write at 100 wpm, so what does it matter that I type that fast?

It's pretty irrelevant nowadays. Tests of typing speed were more important back in the days of secretarial pools where someone would hand a secretary their handwritten notes and the secretary would need to type them up. Nowadays, you're usually composing your thoughts as you're typing, so that's necessarily slower than just copying text (and copy/paste is much faster than retyping something if you do need to pull out an excerpt from something else verbatim).

I think what's only relevant now is if your typing speed is so slow that it is the limiting factor in how fast you can work (i.e., you think through an idea and then spend forever pecking at keys, while your thoughts are already well ahead of where you're typing).

 

[animal12737]

typing speed

my son who is seveteen has had the record in school his best score is 179wpm with 100% accuracy