10 minute typing test

Every long test has a shape. There is a fast, slightly nervous opening; a stretch in the middle where you are typing steadily without really thinking about it; and a final stretch where attention starts to thin and the error count quietly rises. A ten minute test is long enough for all three to be visible, and each of them tells you something different.

The opening shows how well you can focus. The middle shows your working speed, which is the number worth remembering. The end shows how you behave when you are tired, which is a surprisingly important number if your work involves typing for long stretches.

It also removes a shortcut that shorter tests allow. In a one minute test you can power through the first fifteen seconds on adrenaline and coast. Over ten minutes there is no coasting, so the score reflects sustained output rather than a burst.

• Pick paragraph text. Long prose with sentence structure is the closest thing to real writing, and it is the hardest mode to coast through.
• Do not correct your mistakes unless you normally would. Fixing every slip is a habit of some typists and not others. Whichever you do, be consistent, because the keystroke accuracy figure depends on it.
• Do not fight the middle. When the pace drops, resist the urge to hurry. Catching up usually costs more than it saves.
• Run it at a similar time each time. If you take it after lunch every time, that is a fine condition to measure under. What matters is that it does not change.

Net speed is your headline number, and it is lower than your one minute score. That is expected, and it is not a disappointment. If your gross speed is much higher than your net speed, a large share of your output was wrong, which usually means the reading window was too wide.

Character accuracy at the end of the run tells you how clean the text was when the clock stopped, and keystroke accuracy tells you how clean your hands were over the whole ten minutes. When the second number is much lower than the first, you were correcting as you went, which is a healthy habit that costs a little speed and is worth keeping.

Once you have a ten minute baseline, the shorter tests become useful for day to day monitoring. Use theone minute testfor a weekly check and come back here when you want the real picture.