WPM

[tinyjo]

So, I haven't tried WhatPulse yet but it did inspire me to do something I've been meaning to do for a while which is download a little gizmo which sits in my system tray and tracks my WPM. I've often vaguely wondered about it so I thought it'd be fun. I'm currently averaging 62 - I'm sure I can do better than that! It's too tiny to have statistics or anything like that, but it is quite groovy.

Edit: Hah! Told you I could do better - I was up to 92 WPM while filing a bug report just now :)

Comments

[soulsong.livejournal.com]

I average 68 wpm when my fingers are flying, which is distressingly slow really.

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

That's enough to be a professional secretary. Most jobs ask for 60+ wpm. I hit 100+ in training, but that was with constant finger exercises and practice, I'm more like 60+ now I'm not typing as much. The woman who taught me could do 120+!

[soulsong.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm just a well-practiced amateur. I use keyboards all day every day, but I never had any training in the 'proper' finger positions for typing, so really whichever finger feels closest gets the job although all of them tend to get used at one point or another.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Interesting... there is definitely a division of the sexes here, very few male programmers / engineers seem to learn to touch type in my experience - so much so we have had some fun and games at work trying to get people with UK keyboards to enter text in spanish - surely remembering where the accented keys are shouldn't be so hard, but oh no, I have files of menu items, dialog text etc. without accents and print outs with the accents hand written on them- so on Monday or Tuesday I shall be making full use of my 18 years experience as a developer to go through and add the accents into the text.

I used this to great advantage at one job, where I had a French keyboard but the PC was set up as English - therefore as the only person who could touch type (apart from Maria)when I hit the top left key which was marked as A a Q would come out etc. Everyone else fled this PC with superstitious terror, and therefore LEFT IT ALONE, which was a Good Thing.