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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.

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

Should I practise with a drill or with a normal typing test?
Both, and they do different jobs. A normal test measures you; a drill trains a specific weakness. Use a test to find out where you stand, then use drills to fix whatever the test exposed, then test again to see whether the fix worked.
How long should a practice session last?
Ten to twenty minutes of focused work is more useful than an hour of everything. Long sessions tend to drift into autopilot, and autopilot is exactly what you are trying to break out of. Stop while you are still making progress.
Which drill should I do first?
Paragraph practice, because it is the closest to ordinary writing and it trains the skill that everything else depends on: reading ahead. Move to the punctuation drill if your mistakes cluster around commas and quotation marks, and to the number drill if you type figures often.
Do these drills give me a score?
They use the same test as the rest of the site, so yes: gross speed, net speed, character accuracy, word accuracy, keystroke accuracy and an error count. A drill score is a practice figure rather than a benchmark, because the material is deliberately harder than ordinary prose.
Can I practise a specific part of the keyboard?
Yes. The home row lesson has its own drill built around a s d f j k l and the space bar, and it is the foundation that the other drills assume you already have.