When I was a kid - about 14 or 15 - just about everybody who saw me type commented on how fast I went. Back then, I was at about 80 WPM, but now I'm doing around 100 without too many errors (maybe 3 every minute ... more if I'm typing as I think, because I usually go back to rephrase things).

At community college - a very small school in a rural area - half the class would sit and watch me type. They eventually got used to that and left me alone, but the first few weeks of school were just ... weird. (I was a journalism major, so I spent a lot of time in the lab next to that classroom typing stories and stuff for the student newspaper. Otherwise I don't think I would have had much inclination or reason to do any typing at school in the first place ... which would have been nice.)

Anyway ... then I got to university and nobody notices. I notice students, and some teachers, who type about as fast - or even faster - than I do. Nobody gives a rat's fuzzy backside if I can type fast or if I hunt and peck - which to me is sweet, because I'd rather *not* spend my entire time at a four-year university being known as a freak. *grins*

So ... my fascination with social oddities leads me to ask some questions of you all.

1. How fast do you type? Informal estimates are fine. I only know my "official" typing speed because I was tested for a job interview.

2. Where, if any place, do you get the most reaction?

3. I'm also curious about how other people learned how to type. I pretty much had to learn touch typing to keep up in IRC rooms. The ones I liked limited the number of chatters to 50 ... which is a really big conversation even if only half of the people are actively involved.

It's been awhile since I took one of those typing tests but I think it's usually around 70, although when I'm typing stuff from my head it's usually a fair bit higher (I'd guess about 90+) then when I'm re-typing something I'm reading(like those tests are). At my last job everyone said I typed really fast and a few friends have commented but otherwise I haven't had anyone fuss over it... then again I'm in computer science so we all type at varying speeds and see people typing all the time so, likely you'd need to be pushing 150 before anyone would take notice haha.

Have to check again, I think last time I measured I was around 240.

I type fast enough. I took a test here while back and was about 130, but I think that was fake. One of those online things. I would imagine somewhere between 80-110. Depends on what I type. If I'm reading it then it's a little faster. If I'm making it up, obviously it takes time for my brain to complete my thought.

@Yordan: 240 is insanely fast. You could be one of those people that sit and type in court. I forget what they're job title is called. Those people can type tho. I had some classes in High School; your basic word processing classes, and an introductory course in college. Other than that I developed speed on my own. I don't make a lot of errors, but I make enough. Depends on what keyboard I'm using. Maybe 1 every half a minute. Lately I haven't typed as much as I use to, so I'm getting a little sloppier.

I began to start speed typing when i was around 11-12 years old. It's kinda young yeah but that's also when i started creating websites and playing MUD games. Trust me, the last thing any of you "computer geeks" (no offence) out there would never want to play it but its my true mentor in teaching me how to type fast.

For the website thing, well hmm let me see, when i was 12 i joined a thinkquest competition along with a couple of friends. We were supposed to be working everytime after school and we stay back after school almost every day to work on it. Unfortunately, work wasn't really the full word for it. Whenever our mentor left its runescape time for everyone (of course, back when it was a hit). So at the very end, when we only had little time to finish the website, i unleashed my full potential and went speedy gonzalis. Whew...back then if i had worked with HTML for the site at all i would be typing like 200 wpm now but i used Dreamweaver so all i had to do was type information about cars (yeah...lame).

My maximum wpm is like 130 if i know what I'm typing or whatever I'm typing is right above or beside me. My average wpm is like 90-100.

And the final question: I get the most reaction from my own siblings, class, and anyone who see me type SUPERBLY fast in the Media Center of the School every morning trying to do last minute homework.

Yeah, that's fast enough to get stares *grins* even I would stop what I was doing to stare if you could go that fast typing *real words* and not just random stuff *grins*

I can type 200 words per minute, but you can't read them cause they are all mixed up and not necessarily spelled correctly (Just kidding) I had to take keyboarding for a college course and after being in a self paced course for abot a month the instructor came to me when I was hovering aound 40-45 words per minute and asked if I would take a B for the class and I said YES, it was my worst grade all others were A's.

I do have a friend who was also a typesetter and also a freelance journalist who types with his two index fingers. He went to college and part of his course work was either called keyboarding or possibly typewriting, because they still had typewriters back then where you actually had to take you right hand and slap that lever to return the carriage and make a line feed whilst typing. In the course the instructor asked about his unorthodox finger placement, and then the instructor agreed to allow him to challenge the course with a couple of rounds of speed typing. His average over three attempts resulted in 115 words per minute with two index fingers and almost no mistakes, so you never really know.

I alsways did hate the correction fluid and trying to line my page back up to make corrections, I love the new way, I am still waiting for the "smart keyboards that know what it is that I want to type and will be one of the first to own one of them).

What are we testing, since some of these results above seem quite odd. Is it characters/strokes per minute (c/spm) or words per minute (wpm) and how long can you maintain that speed for?

My average is about 85 wpm which I can maintain for a long time (never really tested that aspect).

Anything above 100, especially in the 200 wpm range is definitely enough to enter world records, but it also comes down to how long you can maintain it.

If anyone uses the Dvorak keyboard layout, then I'd probably understand why the high speeds, I just use normal qwerty and would change to dvorak if it was more common, otherwise I'd spend more time teaching myself how to switch between both types of keyboards.

How smart do you want the keyboard, why not the program you use? I'm positive there's many out there that uses predictive typing now, except it's usually based on the main dictionary you've got installed on your system.

Cheers,


MC

I remember going to a typing institute back when I was 13 years old. But I quit before I learned to type the lower row and the numbers row. But it didn't really matter, as I could pick that up quite easily and I really wasn't considering typist as a career opportunity .

How does one find out how fast they can type? Do you use a stopwatch to keep track of the time and then count the number of words you've typed? Or is there any software that'll give you your exact WPM?

There is many software apps available today, some of them are commercial and some are freeware, anyway, just google a bit and you will find them.. There are also few sites that give you typing test for free and they are pretty reliable, some of them gives out certificates for typewriters (that you need to pay actually to get, but the test itself is free).