Punctuation typing test

What the test includes

Sentences start with a capital letter, and the text carries commas, periods, apostrophes, question and exclamation marks, double quotes around short phrases, colons and semicolons, hyphens and occasional brackets. The marks appear in roughly the proportions you'd meet in normal writing, so you get a realistic mix rather than a wall of symbols.

The test runs for 60 seconds with punctuation always on. Turn on the numbers toggle in the ribbon as well if you want digits in the mix, which is close to what you meet in forms and reports.

How punctuation is scored

A punctuation mark is a character like any other. The word "said," with its comma is one word of six characters, and if you leave out the comma or type a period instead, the whole word is wrong. Net WPM counts only the characters in completely correct words (plus the space after each), divided by five, divided by the minutes. Raw WPM counts every character you typed, right or wrong. Accuracy is correct character keypresses over all character keypresses, and a mistake you fixed with backspace still counts as one error. The full definitions are on the scoring methodology page.

There is one cost the score doesn't show directly: Shift. A capital letter, a question mark or a quotation mark is one character in the text but two keys under your fingers, and the Shift press isn't counted as a character anywhere. Here's a worked example. The sentence

She said, "Yes."

is 16 characters long. To type it you press Shift four times (for S, the opening quote, Y and the closing quote), so your fingers make 20 presses to produce 16 counted characters. That's 25% more work for the same score, before you've made a single mistake. In plain lowercase word tests, every press counts.

Measure your punctuation penalty

The useful number on this page is the gap between your plain score and your punctuation score. To find it, take the 1-minute typing test and this test back to back, three times each, and keep the median of each set.

These rows are examples of the calculation, not benchmarks. Divide the gap by your plain median to get the share. Once you've got your own figure, it tells you where your practice time should go: if the gap is large relative to your speed, your letters are fine and your punctuation and Shift technique are the bottleneck. Track the share rather than either raw number. As it shrinks, your punctuation is catching up.

Where each mark lives on a US keyboard

Most punctuation sits under the right hand, and most of it on the little finger, which is the weakest finger you have. Knowing exactly which finger owns each key is the fastest fix for hesitations.

On a UK or other national layout some of these move; the double quote, for example, is not on the apostrophe key everywhere. The test reads the character your system sends, so use the layout you normally type on.

Technique that actually helps

Use the Shift key on the opposite hand. A question mark is typed by the right little finger, so hold Shift with the left. A capital T is typed by the left index finger, so hold Shift with the right. Using one Shift key for everything means half your capitals need a cramped same-hand stretch.

Press Shift before the key and release it after. A very common error in this test is a lowercase letter where a capital belongs because Shift went down a fraction late. If your missed-key list keeps showing the letters you capitalise, slow the Shift press down slightly rather than the whole word.

Type the punctuation as the end of the word. "however," is a single movement that finishes on the comma; treating the comma as a separate decision adds a pause after every clause. The same applies to "it's" and to a closing quotation mark after a period.

Keep your right hand anchored. The little finger reaches up for the hyphen and across for the apostrophe, and the rest of the hand tends to drift with it. Let the index finger stay on J and return the little finger to the semicolon key after each reach.

Don't add spaces English doesn't use. There's no space before a question mark, colon or exclamation mark in English text. If you also write French, where those marks take a space before them, this is an easy habit to carry over by accident, and it costs you the word.

Practice in short, targeted blocks

Long sessions of punctuation drills get tiring because of the little-finger work. Ten minutes a day split into short runs is easier to keep up than one long session. A routine that fits in that time:

1. One plain 1-minute test as a warm-up.
2. Three punctuation tests, checking the most-missed keys after each.
3. One round on practice, which builds a drill around the keys you miss most.
4. One quote typing test on a medium passage, to use the same marks inside real sentences.

The quote test is the real-world check. Its passages come from books, so the punctuation lands where writers put it rather than where a generator does, and the capitals come with names and dialogue. If your punctuation score improves but your quote score doesn't, you're probably still pausing to read ahead in prose.

Who this test is for

Anyone who writes for work types more punctuation than a word test suggests. Emails, reports and support replies are full of commas and periods, and a typist who has only practised lowercase words often slows sharply on real documents. Students writing essays meet the same problem with quotation marks and apostrophes.

Programmers have a different set of keys to worry about, mostly brackets and symbols that this test only touches lightly. If that's you, the post on touch typing for programmers is a better starting point, and this test still trains the Shift habits that code needs.

What is a good punctuation typing speed?

Large studies measure plain sentence typing, not punctuation drills. The biggest, from Aalto University and the University of Cambridge in 2018, measured 168,000 volunteers and found a mean of 52 WPM, with most people between 30 and 60. On this test you should expect a number below your plain-word score, and because our net WPM gives no credit for a word with one wrong mark, the drop is larger than on sites that count raw characters. If your punctuation score is within about 10% of your plain score, your Shift and punctuation habits are in good shape.