A “RealWPM” for Stenography
We have a problem in the Stenography community: measuring your “real world” writing speed.
For character-based keyboards, it’s quite simple: the more keys you can press in less time, the faster you are going to write; thus, the number of “strokes per minute” (SPM) directly translates to your “words per minute” (WPM). Usually, the formula is SPM * 5 = WPM. It's very straightforward.
When somebody new, therefore, comes to stenography, they often have quite a legitimate question that roughly takes this form:
I currently write at XX WPM on my normal keyboard. How do I compare my Steno writing speed to compare with my regular keyboard speed?
This is an especially pertinent problem in the hobbyist community where there is no standard test that people will perform to certify themselves (like there is for court reporters, for example).
I think that we, as a community, would benefit from an agreed upon measure for somebody's “real word” speed and, to achieve that, I want to propose “RealWPM”, a system of measuring real-world typing speed for people with Stenography keyboards.
How does RealWPM work?
It's very simple:
- Run a typing test for the most popular 1-100, 101-1000 and 1001-10000 words for 1 minute each. Record your “pop100” (s), “pop1000” (m) and “pop10000” (l) WPM speeds.
- Run a typing test and use finger spelling exclusively. Record the WPM of your fingerspelling test (f).
- Calculate your RealWPM as follows:
For example, if: pop100 = 70WPM, pop1000 = 40WPM, pop10000 = 10WPM and fingerspelling = 50WPM then:
RealWPM = 52.4
So, even though this particular person can write at 70WPM for the most popular 100 words, their real-world writing speed is just over 50WPM.
And that’s it! Try it out for yourself! Post your scores to your friends.
P.S. If you measure for only 1 minute on each test, that would be your “1m RealWPM”. Your “5m RealWPM” will be more accurate than the 1m test if you are willing to invest 20 minutes instead of 4 minutes. Good luck!
But how do I measure my RealWPM?
I would use TypeyType, the popular online Stenography practice tool. It already has typing tests for the top 100, 1000 and 10000 words. Unfortunately, it does not have the ranges 101–1000 and 1001–10000, but it is close enough for our purposes.
Record your speed for the three 100, 1000, and 10000 drills and use the formula above to compute your RealWPM.
If the creator of Typey Type reads this, I would totally submit a request to make measuring “RealWPM” be an official integration into the tool.
Note: You can do something similar on Monkeytype, but unfortunately, it only has a top-200 and not a top-100 words section.
Where did RealWPM come from?
In a follow-up post, I’ll explain my logic for where it came from. But it is essentially based on Zipf’s law and the idea that:
- The top 100 words are used 50% of the time.
- The top 1000 words are used the remaining 40% of the time
- The top 10000 words are used the remaining 9% of the time.
- The remainder could technically be fingerspelled, so you should not be slower than that theoretically thus the last 1% fingerspelling speed.
It’s not a perfect measure, but it will give you a better result than doing a 10s drill on Monkeytype.
In the meantime, please give it a go, let me know if it could use a better name and let me know how you would improve it! Cheers!
