words per minute
The results of the latest “Casual Friday” at Cognitive Daily are in. Last week, the Casual Friday survey had its participants do a minute of work at TypingTest.com and then answer some questions about typing habits and training.
The results? Don’t look at the keyboard and get some musical training. Both were big factors in a person’s ultimate typing speed. I was surprised to find my net typing speed of 81 words per minute was well above the sample average, despite my freakish habit of using the middle finger to type the backspace. Go me. It’s also worth noting that I’ve never touched a musical instrument, except for a brief and uneventful flirtation with the drums (no different from all my flirtations, really) back in middle school. From what some people have told me, the fact that I never learned to play the piano amounts to a tragic waste of my long, slender fingers.
As far as future research, I’d love to see how the kind of typing in this quick study, transcription, compares with generative typing speeds. I find that I type much more quickly when I’m not looking at the words on the screen. I’ve never really been sure why that is.
I’m curious about transcription vs. generative typing as well; I consider myself to be a pretty fast typist (probably about the same speed as you), but my typing speed slows tremendously when I try to transcribe something, possibly because we’re so used to reading to gather information that instead of trying to view the text and regurgitate it back out through our fingers, we try to learn something. Sounds like something you high-falutin’ psych PhD types should take a look at.
I think the text you’re typing affects things, too. I got 73 WPM on the Zebra text, 101 WPM on The Enchanted Typewriter, and 92 on Decision-Making. Taking the tests a second time (and, thus, having recent ‘muscle memory’ for specific words) improved my speed immensely.
On the other hand, my transcriptive typing is much, much faster than my generative typing. Something like this post would be, for me, about 30 WPM (if not less) because I tend to constantly revise what I write as it is written.
Ditto, sociallytangent. My generative typing is very slow (which is too bad because my finaly essays are due in four days) as compared to my transcriptive keying. Get this, however, I will add the perspective of a dyslectic. This online type tester we’ve all tried messes with my (according to test scores) moderately dyslexic brain! As you may or may not know, some dyslectics are some of the fastest readers you will ever meet. The dyslectic’s eyes quickly scan lines and shoot down the end of the page over dozens of words. Turns out, dyslexia is more a time dependent processing problem than it is a matter of seeing “$()@skje#@1″ –jumbled and confusing text– where words should be. Trouble is, one’s memory can only hold so much information without actually attending to the text…which is where many dyslectics’ troubles with reading arises. Quick scanning but often we have no idea what we’ve “read.”
The rapid scanning of text has always been an advantage to me when transcribing from a visual source. In high school, I won a state competition for “business English and typing” and clocked in at 124wpm (cool fact: my Mom once set a state typing record on an IBM standard electric typewriter at over 150wpm). With this type tester online, however, I only reached 80wpm one time, and mostly fluctuated in the 70 range. The way it presents the words for transcription was very troublesome. The word you are supposed to be typing is highlighted in blue text and when you complete a word the next one is highlighted. That movement of the blue highlight kept jerking my eyes’ attention back to the word I was working on and didn’t allow for scanning of whole lines for me to then type quickly. Weird stuff.