The five practice modes

The practice surface supports five modes. They behave differently. Pick the one that matches what you are training.

Time

A countdown timer. The session ends when the clock reaches zero. The most common mode and the one shown in screenshots everywhere.

Use it when you want a benchmark. A 60-second time test is the standard wpm measurement; a 30-second test is the standard for sprints. The number you get is comparable across sessions and -- with caveats -- across people.

The downside: you can stop typing whenever you like and the clock does not care. If you want every keystroke to count, use Words mode instead.

Words

You set a word count. The session ends when you have typed that many words.

Word mode is better than time mode for two reasons:

• It is honest about effort. A 100-word session takes whatever it takes; you cannot pad the wpm by typing fast for ten seconds and then watching the timer.
• It rewards endurance. The 500-word challenge is real work even at 60 wpm.

Use Words mode for most practice. It is what real writing feels like.

Quote

You type a single piece of literary or historical text. The session ends when the passage ends.

Quotes are pulled from a public-domain corpus -- Twain, Austen, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Sagan. The /quotes/ page shows what is available. You can also pin specific authors or quote-lengths in settings.

Quote mode is better than word mode for line-break rhythm and punctuation practice. Word mode tests fingers; quote mode tests reading.

Zen

No timer, no goal, no end. You type until you stop.

Zen mode is for warming up, for relaxing, for the kind of typing that happens when you are thinking and the keystrokes are background noise. It does not feed your wpm averages, by design -- a 45-minute Zen session would otherwise dominate the trend chart.

Use it when you want to type without performing.

Custom

You paste in your own text. The site chunks it into typable segments and tracks your progress through them. The text stays on your device; the site never uploads it.

The most common Custom inputs:

• A book chapter you wanted to type but it is not in our library
• A speech you are memorizing
• Code you wrote that you want to internalize the rhythm of
• A poem you love

The /custom/ page accepts pasted text or .txt files up to 200 KB. You can pin custom texts as lessons -- they appear at the bottom of the /lessons/ page once pinned.

Picking one

If you are warming up: Zen.

If you are benchmarking: Time, 60 seconds.

If you are practicing for the long haul: Words, 100 or 200.

If you are building punctuation rhythm: Quote.

If you are working on a specific text: Custom.

You do not need to use all five. Pick the one that matches today and skip the rest.