Ten minutes of continuous prose, timed from the first keystroke. Not a sprint and not an assessment length — a working session, and the truest measure of the speed you type at when nobody is counting.
Every shorter test is a sample; ten minutes is closer to the real thing. Concentration wanders, the wrists settle or tense, and the small inefficiencies that a one-minute test averages out — the pause at the end of every sentence, the glance down for a rare letter — start to add up. The result is typically ten to twenty per cent below your one-minute score, and that lower figure is your working speed: the pace at which a report, a long email or a chapter actually gets written.
It also exposes fatigue directly. Watch the live counter: if it holds within a few words per minute of where it started, your technique is sustainable; if it sags steadily from minute six onward, the limiting factor is tension or posture rather than skill, and the fix is in how you sit, not in more drills.
Writers, transcriptionists, support agents, students facing typed exams, developers who spend the afternoon in a text editor — anyone whose day involves long stretches of typing rather than bursts. Court-reporting and transcription programmes use tests of this length, and some professional typing certifications do too. If you have never held a steady pace for ten minutes, the first attempt is instructive on its own.
It is not the test to take for a quick daily check; the one-minute test is better for that, because you will actually do it every day. Use this one every couple of weeks to see whether your endurance is keeping up with your sprint speed.
Start slightly slower than you think you can go. Most people set off at their one-minute pace, accumulate errors in the third minute, and spend the rest of the test correcting them. A pace you could hold indefinitely, with the eyes reading a few words ahead of the hands, produces a higher net score than a fast start every time.
Rest the fingers on the home row between sentences rather than hovering; hovering is where the tension comes from. If your accuracy drops below about 95% mid-test, ease off for thirty seconds and let it recover — a correction costs more than a slightly slower word.
Ten minutes of keystroke timings is the richest data the coach ever gets from one run. It can separate genuine weak keys from the ones you only miss when tired, show which transitions cost you throughout and which only at the end, and write a drill accordingly. The certificate available from the result shows the net figure over the full ten minutes, which is the one worth putting your name to.