Story Typing Test

Typing drills can be dull. Here you type short original stories — a lighthouse cat, a clockmaker’s apprentice, a rooftop garden, a violin on a late-night platform — at your own pace. The text highlights as you go, your speed and accuracy update live, and when you reach the end of a story you get your final WPM and a new personal best to beat.

Why type stories?

Typing real sentences is closer to everyday writing than random word lists: you meet punctuation, capital letters, common letter patterns and the natural rhythm of English. A story also gives you a reason to keep going — you want to know what happens next — which makes practice sessions longer and more enjoyable without feeling like drills.

The stories

All stories were written for this site. They mix short and long words, include numbers written as words, and use everyday vocabulary.

How to use the test

1. Choose a story and a mode: the whole story, a 1-minute sprint or a 3-minute run.
2. Start typing — the timer begins with your first keystroke.
3. The story darkens as you type correctly; mistakes turn red.
4. Watch your net WPM and accuracy update live.
5. At the end you get your result and your personal best for that story and mode.

Pasting is disabled so results reflect real typing. Best scores are saved only in this browser.

How speed and accuracy are measured

Net words per minute counts five characters as one word and subtracts uncorrected errors, divided by the minutes elapsed. Accuracy is the percentage of typed characters that match the story. Correcting mistakes with backspace removes them from the error count but costs time — the usual trade-off in typing.

Worked example

“The Clockmaker’s Apprentice” is 115 words and about 600 characters, or 120 five-character words. Typing it in 2 minutes 30 seconds with 5 uncorrected errors gives (120 − 5) ÷ 2.5 = 46 net WPM, with about 99% accuracy. Typing it again the next day 45 seconds faster, with the same errors, would give about 66 WPM.

Tips for typing stories faster

• Read a few words ahead of where you are typing.
• Keep your eyes on the text, not your hands.
• Type punctuation with the correct fingers — commas and full stops with the right middle and ring fingers.
• Stay relaxed; tension slows fingers down.
• Aim for smooth, even rhythm rather than bursts.

Typing speed benchmarks

These are rough guides. Speeds on stories are usually a little lower than on common word lists because of punctuation and capitals.

Accuracy before speed

Accuracy is the foundation of fast typing. Each error costs time twice — once to notice it and once to fix it — and practising mistakes trains your fingers to repeat them. Many teachers recommend holding accuracy at 96–98% or better and letting speed rise naturally. If accuracy drops below that, slow down for a session or two until it recovers.

Typing stories with children

Stories are ideal for children learning to type because they stay interested in what happens next. Start with the whole-story mode and no time pressure, celebrate finishing a story, and only then introduce the timed sprints. Short sessions of ten to fifteen minutes work better than long ones, and a finger placement chart beside the keyboard helps build good habits from the start.

Warming up

A minute of warm-up makes a real difference to your results. Rest your fingers on the home row — A S D F for the left hand and J K L ; for the right, with thumbs on the space bar — and type a few easy lines slowly and accurately before starting a timed run. Stretch your wrists and fingers, sit upright with feet flat on the floor, and position the screen so the text is at eye level. Keep wrists level rather than resting them heavily on the desk while you type.

Tracking progress over time

Your personal best for each story and mode is saved in this browser, but a written log shows longer trends. Record the date, story, mode, speed and accuracy after each session. Over a few weeks you should see both numbers rise; if speed goes up while accuracy falls, slow down again.

Punctuation practice

The stories include commas, full stops, apostrophes and quotation marks, which slow many typists down. In the test, apostrophes and quotation marks are shown as the plain keyboard characters, so you type them exactly as they appear. If a character is marked red, look closely at it — the difference is often a missing comma or a capital letter.

Practice plan

Privacy

Everything runs in your browser. What you type is not uploaded.