The one time I’ve taken a typing test, I was certified at around 65 wpm.
I tend to reach this speed, however, largely when working from an already-existing text. I tend to be slower when I actually type, as the time it takes to think up the message slows the speed.
Have no idea. Am fairly fast, but there are definite errors that I have to go back and fix as I’m going along, which probably would bring me down a few notches in a real test along with deflating my ego to a hair above non-existent.
The last timed typing test I took were when I was forced to seek temp work in an unemployed season about 10 years ago: 74-78 WPM. There was a time when I was quite fast, in the vicinity of 120 WPM but I can’t sustain that any more, I just don’t type from copy often enough any more to be in practice.
Hahahaha! The last time I took a typing test was in February 1974, on an IBM Selectric. What a sweet machine. I got 85 wpm. I was a clerk for several years and I got to well over 100 wpm in that time. I doubt I’m able to do more than 50 wpm now. Salem, if you weren’t just wooshing us, errors count against your score, resulting in a lower wpm rating. Too many and you failed the test (I was taking it for employment). The ‘words’ in wpm are (were?) standardized; I think it was five characters counted as a word.
ETA: I took touch typing class in summer school at the local high school between 5th and 6th grades. I had to sit on a phone book to reach the typewriter, since I was such a little kid.
Inspired by this thread, I took an online typing test to see how crappy I really am. But I realised immediately that it’s not a fair test because it was measuring how well I could copy text - not how fast I could type something as it streamed out of my head.
I got 40 wpm using their method, but how realistic is that? How often do people copy from text anymore? Especially with OCR it’s almost become an obsolete need.
I mean, nobody needs to write much on paper anymore (apart from short scribbled notes and the like) because it’s just as convenient to type it into your computer yourself.
I type faster than my IBM Selectric can handle, and occasionally faster than the damn computer can handle. It’s fun to watch the computer go back and correct its mistakes.
Someone once compared the sound of my typing on the typewriter to a machine gun.
Last time I played around with one of those “learn to type” games (actually, it was a webpage, but I don’t have it in my favourites any more), I’d hover around 60-75wpm. Yes, it changed that much. A lot of it was linked to whether it included characters I never use, or characters that in an American keyboard are a single keystroke but which require an AltGr (@) or Shift (/) in my Spanish keyboard.
Back when I was learning to type in school (6-8 grades), we had to go over 200 keystrokes per minute. Any backstrokes, deletes and corrections substracted, of course. I used to have my typing speed limited by the mechanism of the Olivetti, if I typed as fast as I could the levers would get stuck.
Yah, I was whooshing you. I took a typing class in high school long, long ago (back in the stone age, when we typed on rocks…) but never was employed in a position where typing was a requirement or was tested. I’m pretty fast when I’m typing out of my head, but if I have to copy text, I’m fairly horrible. And I hate it. Hate, hate, hate it. I make mistakes and I just blank on where things are on the keyboard, whereas when I’m typing from my head I never have to look at the keyboard, I can just type. So copying from text is really frustrating. I’m an editor and producer (and coffeemaker) of a paper that I co-own (small, community weekly, but well-loved!) and when I have to type something that someone sends in long-hand (and yes, people occasionally still do that!), I just cringe at the thought and do everything in my power to either avoid it or get my daughter to do it!
Last time I took a test I was at 95WPM @ 98% accuracy. I was concentrating on avoiding mistakes though; normally I make more mistakes than that, but I generally catch them before they become a problem.
That’s been my plateau for yonks – probably since the late 80s anyway, but I taught myself to touch-type, and therefore have a slightly unconventional style. I could probably type faster if I did things the way typing teachers teach you to type, but old habits and all that – and anyway, 95 hardly makes me a slouch, so … meh. Good enough.
This is actually a funny topic for me. I type funny – I use my right thumb, forefinger and middle finger, and my left forefinger, occasionally I will use my left middle finger, but not very often. because I am dyslexic, I don’t do well on typing tests that require that I copy text – unless the test doesn’t count correcting errors against you (some do, some don’t) on a text copying test, I usually hit around 70 wpm. If it is a transcription program, then I hit closer to 130, if it’s coming straight from my head, well, gods only know what my speed is.
I do the chat for our web site as well as answering phones here at work, so quite often I will be typing while talking to a customer on the phone, and am consistently being asked “ohmigosh, how many words per minute do you type!??!” When I was in college, I had to take typing and the professor point-blank told me that if I didn’t “test-out” of the class, he would fail me regardless of my speed because of the way I type. I have to watch the keyboard while I type (80% of the time), not because I don’t know where the letters are, but to keep from making the dyslexic errors that I make. So, yeh, I tested out of the class.
