Hit: Keyboarding question

[Laura Richards <LERich7@AOL.COM>]

Dear LM_Netters,

I asked about how to determine keyboarding speed and, as usual, you responded
quickly and were very helpful.  Here's what I found out:

every 5 keystrokes  is a word including spaces.  divide test by that and see
how many "words" typed in the minute time segment.

As a former typing teacher I think I recall that each five strokes was
counted as a word.  I cannot remember the name of the book we used but in
the book (maybe just the teacher book) small red numbers were above the
words such as 5, 10, 15, 20 etc..  I believe the end of the line also had a
red number.  I'll be happy to e-mail with you have any more questions.  I
loved teaching typing.  I used to tell my students it was the most relevant
class they'd take in high school.  I still believe that.

Haven't checked on this lately, but in 1981 the standard was five
keystrokes equals one word.  Keystrokes include letters, numbers,
symbols, and spaces.  My typing teacher (1981) posted both gross and
corrected WPM; the corrected WPM include a subtraction for errors.

I once worked at a business school. Their method consisted of counting all
words typed in a given time. Typing drill books usually list the word count at
the end of each line. Divide the number of words by the number of minutes.
From this number, mistakes were deducted. The answer would be the words per
minute. For example if 100 words were typed in 2 minutes, you would divide 100
by 2 with an answer of 50. If 2 mistakes were made,  the typing speed would be
48 words per minute. Hope this helps. I haven't heard of any other methods.

Thanks for your help!

Laura Richards
Librarian
Fox River Grove School District 3
Fox River Grove, IL  60021
LERich7@aol.com

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