WPM: How Fast Can You Really Type?

I recently read a job application form that contained a rather interesting question. The question read "Typing Speed (WPM):". Now this would be a perfectly normal question if the job application was for a secretary or typist position, but the job in question was actually for a software engineering position.

I have been touch-typing (yes, all ten fingers--not just the two index fingers) since I was about 10 years old, and I must say that I can type rather quickly. But I have never actually measured my typing speed in terms of words-per-minute (WPM). So I decided to fire up a Linux console and find out once and for all.

The method I used is actually very simple.

1. Type a bunch of words in the console
2. Find out how many words I typed
3. Find out how long it took me to type those words
4. Use those two figures to compute my typing speed in words-per-minute

Here is what I did:

time cat | wc -w
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's head
[^D]

10

real    0m9.113s
user    0m0.008s
sys     0m0.000s

For those of you who are new to the Linux console, this is what is happening in the above chain of commands:

• The cat command captures whatever you type at the keyboard until you type Ctrl+D.
• This text is then "piped" to the wc (Word Count) command. The -w option tells wc to return the number of words in the text piped to it.
• The above mentioned commands are executed through the time command which measures how much time it took to execute those commands. What is of interest is the first line with the "real"time required to execute.

Computing the Words-per-Minute

The output of the chain of commands (also known as a "pipeline") tells us the two things we need to compute my typing speed: The number of words I typed and the time it took me to type them. Here's some simple math:

In 9.113 seconds I typed 10 words
So in 1 second I could type 10/9.113 words
So in 60 seconds (1 minute) I could type 60*10/9.113

Therefore my typing speed is 65.84 words per minute

Improving the Accuracy

You can only get a rough idea of your typing speed if you type in only 10 words. To get an accurate idea of your typing speed you should try entering a paragraph or two (or more) of text and using the above formula to compute the speed.

Characters-per-Minute

If you want to compute the number of characters you can type in a minute, you should use the wc command's -c switch instead of -w.

Difficulties with MS Word Files on GNU/Linux

I have been using Linux as my primary desktop (as apposed to server) operating system for quite sometime. However, I have always had access to a Windows machine whenever I was *required* to produce Microsoft Word or PowerPoint documents.

Things have changed a little bit since then. Now all the computers I have access to run Linux. But the *need* for Word documents has not completely gone away. Please don't misunderstand me. I am all for open document formats. In fact, I use them whenever I can. However, when a document is being sent to another party who insists on using Microsoft Word format documents and nothing else (not even Adobe PDF), things begin to get annoying. Free tools like AbiWord and OpenOffice Writer are very good substitutes for MS Word and I often get away with generating documents using one of them. The problem arises when I have to edit and return a document that has already been created with the latest version of MS Word. No matter how good AbiWord and OpenOffice Writer are, and believe me they are quite good with a lot of development effort behind them, they are still not (in my humble opinion) 100% compatible with MS Word. I have come to realize this the hard way when a couple of documents generated using MS Word, possibly the latest flavor, have not come out as expected once they were edited using either of these tools.

The article We Can Put an End to Word Attachments by Richard Stallman explains some of the problems behind widespread use of closed and restrictive file formats such as MS Word, and what we can do to limit their influence on our everyday electronic document interchanges.


Links

• We Can Put an End to Word Attachments by Richard M. Stallman
  http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
  
  
• Richard M. Stallman
  http://www.stallman.org/
  
  
• OpenOffice Writer (Windows 98 - Visa, GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X*)
  http://www.openoffice.org/
  
  
• OpenDocument format
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
  http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office
  
  
• AbiWord (Windows 95b - Vista, GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X)
  http://www.abisource.com/
  
  

* Requires X11 under Mac OS X