Why 100 words is an accuracy test
A 100-word passage from our 1,000-word English list averages about 570 characters, roughly 114 five-character words in WPM terms; across 20,000 generated passages, 90% fell between 539 and 602 characters. At 60 WPM that is just under two minutes of typing.
More words mean more chances to slip, and on TypeTrance every slip you leave behind voids a whole word. So treat this test as an accuracy test: the goal is a clean passage at a steady pace, not a fast start.
How accuracy is counted
TypeTrance’s accuracy is the share of your keystrokes that were right at the moment you typed them. A typo you fix still counts as a miss, and so does a typo you leave behind. Text-entry researchers make the same distinction: Soukoreff and MacKenzie split errors into corrected and uncorrected, and showed that putting effort into correcting errors moves them from one group to the other but does not change the total error rate. TypeTrance accuracy works like that total. Only typing it right the first time raises it. A clean 100-word passage is about 570 keystrokes, so each miss costs a little under 0.2 percentage points of accuracy.
Your speed is scored differently. Corrected WPM credits only words that end up exactly right, so fixing a word restores its credit. Put together:
- Leave an error: the word earns nothing, and accuracy drops.
- Fix an error: the word earns its credit back, accuracy still drops, and the fix costs time.
- Don’t make the error: full credit, full accuracy, no lost time.
What to aim for
In a study of 168,960 everyday typists, most participants corrected most of their mistakes: 90% left fewer than 2.66% of their text wrong, and the average was about 1.2%. A detailed error analysis of a subset of the participants found substitutions, pressing a wrong key, were the most frequent kind of error, ahead of missed and extra letters (Dhakal et al., 2018).
On this test, aim to finish with every word credited, then work on accuracy itself. The Characters line in your result (correct / incorrect / extra / missed) and the keyboard heatmap show what kind of slips you make and on which keys.
How to type a clean 100 words
- Read ahead. Skilled typists read ahead of the key they are pressing; when experiments block that preview, their advantage shrinks almost to the level of novices (as reviewed by Keith and Ericsson, 2007).
- Fix inside the word. Backspace before you press space; once you have moved on, fixing means going back.
- Hold a pace you can keep. After a slip, recover your rhythm before you think about speed.
- Repeat, then refresh. Press Repeat text to retype the same passage until it comes out clean, then take a new passage with Next test to check that the improvement holds.
If your accuracy keeps slipping below where you want it, the accuracy drill adds Word Lock, which won’t let you move past a wrong word. For the bigger question of when to slow down and when to push, read accuracy vs speed.