Guide

Typing practice with great essays

Most typing practice uses random words or made-up sentences. Copywork gives you real paragraphs instead: essays by good writers that you retype word for word, with your mistakes, speed and accuracy shown as you go. It suits adults who want to type faster and read something worth reading at the same time.

Why practice on real prose

Typing tests are usually built from lists of common words. That is a fair way to compare speeds, but it is not what you type at work. Real writing has capital letters, commas and semicolons, quotation marks, apostrophes, dashes, long words and short ones, and sentences that run for a line or for five. Practicing on paragraphs means practicing on all of that.

It is also easier to keep going. A list of words has no reason to be read to the end; an essay does. When the text has an argument, you want to know where it goes next, and a twenty-minute session passes without the drill feeling like one. And because you are reading closely while you type, you take in how the writer builds sentences and paragraphs, which is the idea behind copywork.

How typing practice works here

  1. Choose an essay. Browse all essays or pick one of the short ones below. Each essay shows an estimate of how long it takes to type.
  2. Type over the text. The essay is on the screen and you type directly over it. Correct characters fill in; wrong ones are highlighted right away so you can backspace and fix them.
  3. Stop whenever you like. Your place is saved, so you can come back and continue where you left off. Without an account it is kept in your browser; with an account it is saved to your account and available on any device.
  4. See your results. When you finish an essay you get your words per minute and accuracy. If you are signed in, each finished essay is recorded on your progress page so you can see how you change over time.

Practicing is free. Without an account you can type the opening of any essay and the full text of the public-domain classics listed below. A free account unlocks the full text of the other essays we have in full.

How speed and accuracy are measured

Speed is reported in words per minute (WPM), using the standard convention that a “word” is five characters, including spaces and punctuation. Only correct characters count toward it. The clock covers the time you are actually typing: it starts at your first keystroke, and any pause longer than five seconds counts as five seconds, so stopping to reread a sentence or answer a message does not ruin the number.

Accuracy is the share of your keystrokes that matched the text. A mistake you go back and fix still counts against it, because the point is to notice where your fingers slip, not only whether the final text is right.

Speeds on real prose usually come out lower than on a word-list test, because punctuation, capitals and long words take more effort. That is expected, and it is a more honest picture of how fast you type in everyday writing. Compare yourself with your own earlier sessions rather than with numbers from other sites.

Short essays to start with

For a first session, pick something you can finish in one sitting. These are the shortest essays in the catalog:

Classics you can type in full

These essays were published long enough ago to be in the public domain in the United States, so anyone can read and type the full text, with or without an account. The texts come from Project Gutenberg. They are a good change of pace from modern prose: longer sentences, older punctuation and a vocabulary that keeps you looking at the screen.

Tips for practicing with paragraphs

  • Accuracy first. Slow down until most of your keystrokes are right. Speed is easier to build on clean habits; practicing fast and sloppy mostly practices the mistakes.
  • Read ahead. Read a phrase or a whole short sentence before you type it instead of copying letter by letter. It keeps your rhythm smooth and cuts down on glances back at the text.
  • Keep your eyes on the screen. If you are learning to touch type, resist looking at the keyboard. You will be slower at first, but it is the habit that lets your speed keep improving.
  • Notice your problem characters. If the same marks keep turning red, such as apostrophes, semicolons or capitals after a full stop, you have found what to practice.
  • Short and regular beats long and rare. Fifteen minutes on most days does more than an hour once a week, and it is easier to keep up.
  • Retype an essay you have done before. Repeating a text you know is a fair way to see whether you have improved, since the difficulty is the same.

Typing practice that teaches writing

Copywork started as a way to practice writing, not typing. Retyping a good essay slowly makes you notice its decisions: where the writer puts the important word, when a sentence is short for emphasis, how one paragraph hands off to the next. If that interests you, read what copywork is and how to do it, try a few writing exercises built on imitation, or see our guide on how to become a better writer.

Or just start typing: the home page has an essay ready to go.