Typing practice
Drills for the parts you are worst at
A general typing test tells you that you are a bit slow. It does not tell you where. These drills isolate the three things that slow most people down: reading ahead, the number row and punctuation. Each one runs the same live test, so every drill you finish produces a score you can compare with the last.
Three drills, three different problems
Paragraph practice
Continuous prose with real sentence structure, for training reading ahead and holding an even rhythm over a long passage.
Trains: reading ahead, pacing, staying accurate when you are tired.
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Number practice
Figures, dates, quantities and currency, the material that most people type rarely and therefore most slowly.
Trains: the number row, the shift key, keeping your place in a sequence.
Start drilling →
Punctuation practice
Commas, apostrophes, quotation marks and brackets, which is where most hesitation actually happens.
Trains: the right hand reaching up, and the shift key for capitals.
Start drilling →
How to use a drill properly
Most people practise the wrong way. They run a drill once, feel a bit bad about the score, and stop.
- Find the problem first. Take a normalaccuracy test and look at where the errors are. If they cluster around punctuation, practise punctuation. If your speed is fine but your accuracy is poor, practise paragraphs and slow down.
- Run the drill three times, not once. The first run is a warm-up, the second is the real thing, and the third is where you find out whether it stuck. One run tells you almost nothing.
- Fix your mistakes as you go. Backspace and correct them. The point of a drill is to rehearse the correct movement, and a mistake left in place gets rehearsed too.
- Slow down until the errors stop. A drill at half speed with no errors is worth more than one at full speed with a mistake every few characters. Speed comes back on its own once the movements are right.
- Go back to a normal test. A drill is a scalpel, not a thermometer. After a session, take a standardtyping test to see whether the change actually carried over.
What each drill is actually for
The three drills look similar from the outside, but they train different things, and the mistake people make is doing the wrong one for the problem they have.
- Paragraphs are for reading ahead
- Your fingers can already find the keys. What they cannot do yet is type the next word while finishing the current one, which is the single biggest source of lost speed. Paragraph practice gives you long enough stretches of text to rehearse that handover, and the errors it produces are usually reading errors rather than finger errors.
- Numbers are for the top of the keyboard
- The number row is a long reach from the home row, and it is where most people are slowest because they type figures rarely. A number drill builds the reach, and the same reach makes the top letter row and the punctuation keys easier too.
- Punctuation is for the right hand and the shift key
- Everything in the top right corner of the keyboard is reached by the same two fingers, and most hesitation in ordinary writing is a pause before a comma or an apostrophe. Practising punctuation in bulk removes the pause, and the improvement shows up in every kind of writing you do.
Where the foundation is missing
Drills work on top of a position. If your fingers are still hunting for the home row, none of this will stick, because you cannot rehearse a movement you have not learned yet. In that case start with the home row lesson and its drill, then work back to these.
If you can already touch type but your speed has stalled, the answer is more likely to be thelearn typing guideon reading ahead and rhythm than any of these drills.
Frequently asked questions
Questions about typing practice drills.