I have always loved typing. There was a time when I was fascinated by the idea of typing without looking at the keyboard. My typing speed used to be under 20 words per minutes.

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I learnt how to type a decade ago and improving my typing speed is a passion of mine.

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The book 'Grit' by Angela Duckworth talks about the importance of hobbies or learning an instrument as a child. Of persevering at something you are not actually good at to tell yourself that you can get better at something through hard work. I had not read the book as a child, but typing has come to represent that to me.

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I practice typing whenever I get free time or want to relax and not think about tensions. Getting better at typing is a reminder to myself of being able to get better at something you were not by sheer hard work - A testament to my hard work.

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I love the feeling of improving at something with sheer hard work.

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However, a lot of typing websites are mere random words or passages that are a paragraph or two and then repeat ! This is a fantastic idea !

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It's real text. It's literature so it even has a lot of words, which would not appear in everyday conversation. It teaches you new typing patterns and new memories for the muscles to build.

It's also very engaging for the mind and a very constructive website ! Thanks for making it !

When I learned touch typing in highschool many moons ago (on an electric typewriter lol) we were taught not to read the word (when copy typing) but instead break it down into letters to improve our speed, hence the practicing of random letter groups. So a site like this wouldn’t actually be any good because I wouldn’t take in the content.

That's quite cool. What is your typing speed now ?

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Well there goes my work day....but all this typing makes it seem like I'm working on something really important.

You can also hang out on Reddit and learn to type by getting into stupid arguments with perfect strangers 💁‍♂️

That’s pretty funny because I learned the exact opposite. You shouldn’t have to read the letters because you can type much faster if you can read words faster, so the only thing that will ever slow you down is unknown words. And it has matched my experience. Reading far ahead while typing means you can type much much faster. I type like 80-90 words a minute with actual sentences vs like 50 for random letters.

Seems perfect for a Friday.

I've been training myself to type better and you're right. Words become macros and can flow off your fingertips without you even knowing the movements you just made. I sometimes find myself regressing into my old typing behaviors where every letter seems to take a monumental effort to hit, but with practice I've been able to get back on track.

It seems like those ChatAIs would be really good for something like this just to get different texts.

I learned touch-typing when I was 10 because my mom was trying to improve her typing speed for a job interview and picked up an audio tutorial, and I was bored over winter break. I realized quickly that I absolutely love typing!

Like you, I do typing games and practice for fun, as a way to decompress. It feels like a strange "hobby" to have, but now I can easily, and accurately, type 90 - 100 wpm and the skill has gotten me a lot of jobs over the years.

It was the best of times; it was the blurst of times?!

It seems to me that typing by letter instead of word would be a great hindrance. I type around 130 wpm in English, but when the language changes, that goes down significantly. Mentally, my fingers type words like a pianist plays an arpeggio. You don’t think of every letter, you think of groups of letters, just as the pianist doesn’t think of the individual notes, they think of the entire chord.

I wish I could set it to have two spaces after periods rather than one

This is pretty cool, they should do some kids books as well.

"How did you learn to type so fast?"

"Well you see I get really angry at people on Reddit...."

^(actually i've always been a fast typist but my reddit argument typing is lightning speed)

Welp, I just figured out I have a serious problem. 3 times couldn't write dogs properly, instead typing out dongs...

You like dags?

That's funny I do the opposite, I read a head and already know how to type it so I don't need to see the entire word, I string a lot a few words. I type casually at 80, more at 90-100 fast.

runescape was the main typing training for me growing up haha

as a hyperactive kid, i needed to be able to type as fast as i talked irl 😅

2 spaces went the way of the dodo.

i laughed at this way harder than i should have

I tried out the settings and nothing seems to accommodate two spaces after a sentence. I'd be ok taking a hit to the accuracy if there was a setting that didn't blow everything up after that. But even ignoring punctuation or stopping after an error doesn't line up it right.

It seems to me that the process of typing, rapidly reproducing words as your looking at them, is not conducive to understanding the text and absorbing the underlying message or even the story.

I still have my keyboarding book telling us to do it that way. Haha, 40 years from now I will still show it to people. It's so much more fun to hit it twice!

Macros is a great way to put it. That’s exactly how I feel about it, they aren’t individual letters anymore, they’re a macro to put a word on screen and it’s just easier for your brain to process it that way.

Back in the day, we played MMOs. If you couldn't type fast, in battle, you either died or couldn't communicate.

This could easily derail my whole life. I love typing. Limited myself to just one page. 68 wpm and 96% accuracy. Not too shabby. I think this would be really calming and meditative.

It comes off as an attempt at a joke at their expense. Not a very good joke to begin with, but once it gives a negative vibe... Pffbt.

Thank you❤️

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Hunter S. Thompson honed his craft early on by doing this, I believe with the books The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms. His rationale was that he wanted to know how it felt to write masterworks like that

A little motivation always helps

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It's a really bad practice though. I mean, it was bad practice then, and it is worse practice now. Unless you are typing with a 1930's typewriter, and even then it was a subject of debate among typographers. European press hated it. Graphic designers have always been against it as well. It fucks up legibility, creates rivers, looks ugly and makes parsing text harder for computers. Essentially it's exclusively an US stubbornness thing. Just like people adding vertical space with newlines, it's a holdover from worse times.

that is so typist of you!

Gotta get those retorts in quick.

> The book 'Grit' by Angela Duckworth

hhhhm^m^m^m^m^m I wonder what her nickname was in school, university, and everywhere else

Any reasonable person knows a lot of what you said is subjective.

Ooh, I've been meaning to reread a Christmas Carol for the holidays anyway, and this sounds neat.

YES! I KEPT GETTING ERRORS BECAUSE OF THAT!

Yes, but is it unreasonable or illogical?

I around 85-90 wpm, but I think I could go faster if I stressed myself. Definitely easier on books that don't have a lot of dialog. The quotations, and paragraphs make for more technical typing. Perhaps you'd get used to it though. For example the beginning of Little Women was a bit slower for me than the beginning of 1984.

This is basically the method I used.

I took two years of typing between the 8th and 10th grades. I got up to about 45 wpm.

After moving out on my own, I started calling BBSs (bulletin board systems). These were much more common in the 80s and 90s before the internet took off.

I would spend way too much of my leisure time typing messages on them.

My current typing speed is over 70 wpm. What I find odd is I don't consider my speed all that fast, but I'm way ahead of most people I know. I have one coworker who is faster. Most job descriptions I've seen require 40+. I wouldn't think that a stretch, but too many people can't type. (Side note, the keyboard I had at worked sucked so I bought my own, replaced the key switches with something stiffer, and replaced most of the caps with blanks because I'm a touch typist and a jerk.)

I find Reddit very familiar compared to the BBSs I used to call. I'll probably stay here until it or I am gone.

No. Just not objectively true and it doesn't doesn't settle anything. Folks have had this conversation way better than anyone on here will be able to do, and we've probably read them ourselves already anyway. So it would be nice if this website accommodate both methods

Several years ago, I was able to retrain this out of me. I'm not sad.

Most modern word processors will automatically adjust kerning to what's appropriate after punctuation. It really became unnecessary.

I was initially taught letter by letter, but typing words was a natural evolution as proficiency increased. I think it was even discussed at some point when I first learned (it's been decades so my memory is understandably fuzzy).

Even now, typing on my phone with my thumbs, I'm typing words and not letters.

> Just not objectively true

Nothing is. You do you, if you are the only one seeing your text and want to have fun double spacing, go ahead. Knock yourself out, break that space bar. But as soon as you are writing for publishing or for others you'll have your text immediately manhandled, criticized and corrected. And it will all be with those same subjective opinions that are going to determine the validity and worth of your writing. I've seen editors throw away pitches because of the double space thing, “It is in the guidelines, if they won't read and respect the submission guidelines then they are not worth my time.”

Whoever types and reads count of monte cristo or les mis is a brave soul

No you cant

While at university I got a work/study grant typing for a professor who was doing a study of the evolution of English spelling and typography (or something like that) based on comparison of editions of King Lear across the centuries. I got an hourly rate and a set number of hours to work. I forget how many.

The first edition I typed was a rough go because most but not all s characters were a tall curly f-like character that wasn’t on the keyboard and needed to be typed as $ every time. The play was great though.

I was halfway through a second edition with no odd characters to slow me down when my allotted hours were up. But I was so looking forward to that bit where Gloucester and Ed(gar?/mund?) were in a field but supposedly at the top of a cliff that blind Gloucester was going to pitch himself off, and all the other tragic events, that I just kept on going. The prof said “You didn’t have to finish it, you know.” Yeah, but I did.

It was in a dingy computer lab and the keyboard was all greasy and gross, but it was still the best job. So much fun.

I've seen it go the other way in a professional setting. One place I worked you couldn't put documents out to clients with single. One of the jr. analysts even redid templates once for the single method and the senior management squashed it. This was 5 years ago. A couple others, people put things out both ways.

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I believe you though.

So easy! The trouble then is when at work you have to type a colleague’s name ending in “shid” and every single time you need to correct what your brain is accustomed to typing, and you live in fear of the day you slip up.

The average Reddit user has nothing on MMORPG and FPS players of old. Back when you had to type a sentence blazing fast so you could get back to the hot keys. Often leading to misspellings and many times hotkeys being sent in chat.

I'd rather get into perfect arguments with stupid strangers. 😏

Yes you can. But an argument isn't just contradiction. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.

wrong

Every once in awhile I use the fast fingers website, but I think my speed is influenced by my piano studies. I don’t regularly practice typing, but I do it often as I write a lot. In my experience, I type full words, not the letters of those words (mentally, I mean). There are some words that I type very fast because they are ingrained in my finger memory, but if the word is new or less common, I type it slower.

40+ with 97% accuracy is basic competency. Should be enough for most jobs.

70+ with 98% accuracy is proficient. It's a good target for any work that requires significant communication by email or report writing.

100+ with 99% accuracy is an attainable target with intentional practice. It's a good target for taking minutes and other jobs that require typing "live".

If I had to type live on a regular basis, I think I'd learn how to use a court reporting machine. Mind you, that only works if I get to transcribe later.

“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.”

I found the opposite. The process of focusing on every word helped increase my reading comprehension.

Maybe it depends on your reading and typing speed? idk

That is the worst idea I've ever heard! /s

I think this is probably a more accurate description of the way I was taught, letters initially which is to learn the QWERTY keyboard layout and get it so you don’t have to think about where each letter is, and then with practice you will sight the word and just type that at speed, but new words or those with unfamiliar spelling still get broken down to letters.

I don't know, I read far, far, faster than I type, and do fine with reading comprehension.
I also find the act of writing things helps me process them better.
So I kinda think this would be like combining the two. Definitely going to give it a try, since the random word typing could never get me to hang in past a couple minutes before driving me nuts.

I took a note taking and speed reading class once and they teach you to use your finger to keep track of what word you are on and to speed through a paragraph ignore the basic words like pronouns or and and the cause your brain is seeing them but you don’t need to focus consciously to pick them up.

Yeah, stenography is a whole other thing.

I can type ~95 WPM with high accuracy when I'm focusing; this is enough that I'm able to keep up with the main ideas that need to be recorded in meeting minutes (and similar reporting/tracking documents), but definitely not word-for-word transcription.

To keep up with spoken language, you either need to learn stenography or slow down an audio recording. Or limit people to talk more slowly, lol.

Exactly my point. Subjective opinions shape the material world. Subjectivity is the source of reality.

Great practice for plagiarists!

No it isn't!

Yes it is.

I think my brain must process that differently. If I have a word pop up that I don’t have “programmed” then I do default back to the character by character typing.

You can also feel like the author of the world's classic masterpieces of literature.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, and into an adventure that would change everything he thought he knew about the world and himself.

The quick brown fox is a Fascist and so are you you pathetic piece of worthless racist trash….

This sounds cool. I only use monkey type or nitro type

Yeah man. Some people like it. Some don't. So it's a shame this otherwise fantastic tool shuts that out.

I love the idea, but I’m having a very hard time with legibility with the extra bold serif font.

It’d be nice to have the ability to select a few different fonts. Georgia, Tisa, and Merriweather are considered very legible serif fonts.

Sans-serif is generally considered easier to read on a digital screen — Helvetica, Open Sans, Roboto, PT Sans, and Verdana are very good options.

It looks like you’re using Literata — but you’re relying on the font-weight property to generate the bold weight. These aren’t “true” weights, the browser artificially creates it. Also, not all browsers render “font-weight” equally, so for maximum legibility it’s best to use the exact weight of the original font.

It’s like oblique v italic. Oblique will give you the slant, but it’s not a real italic. Font designer’s consider many different variables when crafting italic and bold styles, the aren’t just slanted or relying on additional stroke for the heavier weights.

Lastly, I think it would be helpful if the font size was bigger. Because you’re focusing on each letter / word, after awhile it starts blurring together.

But overall it’s a fantastic concept, and you have a great selection of titles as well. Very cool.

EDIT: Regarding fonts, the most legible ones are the ones that have equal character weight. You'll notice with Literata the bars "horizontal line in e, A, f, t, etc" are very thin while the stems & shoulders are quite thick. A famous example of this concept pushed to the extreme is the font Didot, which is featured on the cover of Vogue magazine.

These make for beautiful heading fonts, but poor paragraph fonts as the wide variety in width reduces overall legibility. You probably noticed this with Literata at its regular font weight which is why you changed the font-weight to bold, but I would consider selecting a different font altogether.

Adding two spaces after a sentence is a holdover from typewriting days. It isn’t used anymore as modern fonts adjust for extra space between sentences.

^^ Haha, someone doesn't like my experience

Projection at its finest. Nobody mentioned race until you brought it up, you divisive communist shit. The quick brown fox is the only one who can save our country! Why do you hate our freedom?

I like Typing of the dead.

Genius!!! Thanks!

I'd be happy with a dictation machine and a foot pedal.

I used to have a client who did at home dictation on her computer. Apparently there are no good food pedals. The ones out there are expensive and poorly made.

Same, but mine was Minecraft public servers (usually Hypixel)

I've been doing this for a while now. I typed all of "Lupin, Gentleman Burgler"
It's a nice service.

As someone with adhd that always needs to be doing two things at once for my brain to not be bored, this is great. I always have to be doing something with my hands and I love reading.

I originally learned how to type and program on MUDs.

Maybe the monkey was ahead of its time and meant blursed.

Cool site! Typed The War Of The Worlds there, improved my wpm from 40 to 50.

It’s really not. Style guides exist for this reason. There are rules of grammar, style, and punctuation.

https://www.thesaurus.com/e/writing/is-there-1-space-or-2-after-a-period/ “According to every major style guide you’ll find, the rule is a single space after a period or any other punctuation mark you use to end a sentence. Even the APA, the staunchest defender of the double space over the decades, changed their stance on the issue in 2019.”

You can just ignore their advice : just like you can use the wrong punctuation and Capitalization whEnever you want’”

But that doesn’t mean it’s subjective. That’s like saying having 2 periods at the end of each sentence is subjective. It really isn’t.

Whether an authority says X or not doesn't mean it looks ugly. And legibility for one person is different than for other people. I've delt with parse texing the difference on computers and it's not ba.... nevermind. This discussion has been done and it's not what I'm here for

What are you calling me perfect for then?

Because you are. You are complete, and whole, and perfect. And you don’t even realize it. And that, is perfect.

This is super cool if I weren’t already burnt out on typing. Oh Lordy, war and peace!! Carpal tunnel and life lessons dual pack!

Nah its about effectiveness, typing fast will make you do a typo which they'll use to disregard your whole argument with a strawman.

Typing for later

Or playing Typing of the Dead, which is great fun.

Ohhh yes, OSRS back in the day taught me my 3-total-fingers typing method of immense speed. I call it the speed-pecker technique.

I really wish I typed normally lmao, but 70-80wpm is functional enough to write code and chat people, so oh well.

Definitely depends on the person. I'm the same way as the top commenter, I will process next to nothing of the context of the sentence when typing for speed/technique. Then again I also have the problem of reading sentences and just generally not processing any of the meaning (especially when I have other thoughts in my head), leading to me having to reread stuff.

Same goes for reading, trying to intentionally read fast for practice/competition, none of the meaning makes it to my brain. Usually when I read a book I read it at somewhat of a narrating-out-loud pace, makes it feel more comfortable and like I'm watching a movie in my head.

I'm a speed demon when I'm reading fiction, so I wonder if that's part of it, too. I need to slow down dramatically to type it.

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Try the Gutenberg project as a volunteer.

I started learning the Dvorak keyboard layout in the mid 90s, when IRC was at its peak, and I found IRC indispensable in learning how to type quickly. The big channels moved fast in those days, so if you couldn't get a response typed out in a few seconds, the conversation would have already moved on.

I remember distinctly that 'h' and 'a' were the first 2 letters I learned in Dvorak just because I could get in a 'haha' lightning fast on IRC. (Well 'a' in Dvorak is easy to learn anyway, since it's in the same spot as in QWERTY)

As a very proficient typist (generally around 130-140 wpm with 98% accuracy, can blast past that if I'm focused in short stretches) that also works in video and has to do a LOT of transcription to caption my work if it's not pre-scripted (most of my work is for the government, so accessibility is required), I've been flirting with the idea of picking up a steno keyboard (or setting up one of my existing keyboards since I can just map it with software) and trying to learn that, especially since I've been doing a lot of live transcription and note-taking in our dnd campaigns. I can generally keep up with slow speakers on a normal keyboard, but fast conversation between 6 people eludes me sometimes if I'm trying to capture actual quotes.

Tbh the DnD is strangely driving me to learn it more than work is, since AI transcription has taken some INSANE jumps recently - with recent updates, I can now have my editing software transcribe a conversation between 3 people (that are well mic'd and assuming none of them have insane accents) and get the result with 99% accuracy, divided by person speaking (e.g. the software recognizes that there are 3 distinct people speaking and sets up the transcription as such, like "Person 1: bla bla", "Person 2: Oh of course blah blah") along with actual grammar/capitalization/etc in a matter of minutes, so all of a sudden I've just been randomly freed of a bunch of onerous busy work, which I don't hate.

For some reason it just seems super cool to me to be able to take down word for word notes as someone's speaking, which is weird, but something that would be fun to follow up on.

flash2:wave2:selling laws 1k ea

Love the idea of "macros" for individual words, bc as a solid typist (130-140wpm) that's exactly what it feels like to me when I'm "in the zone" and really pushing. If you can read far enough ahead that you're seeing words and have a sense of the paragraph you're writing (or the paragraph you're trying to say if it's something original you're writing), words on a keyboard are kind of just collections of letters and easy to repeat sequences that you can hammer out within less than a second. It's kinda musical in a way, like you're swapping chords on a guitar or piano, and I envision chords on either instrument pretty much the exact same way - you're just throwing your hands into a default position without really thinking about the specific positions bc you know that this "form" of your hands makes this sound, so you don't have to think about how each finger on each string or key is making its own impact.

Obv this all comes with a lot of practice, and I've gotten a TON of practice typing from the nature of my work, but faster typing is absolutely attainable for anyone that can put in some time practicing.

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I like caravans more.

Angie?

Check out the typing of the dead

I once saw someone wrote “I f*ck my mom” followed by “*your”.

This is awesome!

I feel the same way about my yoga practice. I've been practicing for over a decade. When I first started, it took me six months of regular practice to balance on one leg. Today in class I was reminded that no matter how long I take between classes my yoga practice taught me to move more gracefully and intentionally through the world, both physically and psychologically.

And I love how this combines reading with leveling up a skill! Thank you!

I used to do Minecraft roleplaying back in the day. I just typed out a page of Call of Cthulu and apparently my typing speed is around 110 WPM still. When really trying, I can get it to around 120.

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But I will never find out what happened with the brown fox and the lazy dog.

I wont use this but its cool!

It's amazing to see you making progress ! Ultimately, our progress with our steadfast persistence is what really motivates us and makes us feel better !

It's wonderful that you have progressed so far ! It's amazing the influence parents can have on children by osmosis ! I hope your mother was able to increase her typing speed!

This is how I learned in 2000? Except instead of reddit it was Diablo 2 and Everquest chat.

Also forums like flame4cash and ShinraOnline.

This is the way.

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Bronson Pinchot has entered the chat!

MUDs were before we had high enough speed internet that the typing could keep up. I remember typing out stuff and waiting as it slowly showed up on the screen. Memories. LOL