Graduation: five minutes, fluent

This is the last lesson. If you pass the check below you will have typed for five minutes at forty-five words a minute with no more than three errors in a hundred keystrokes, which is a fair definition of fluent: faster than most people write by hand, faster than most people think in sentences, and steady enough that the typing is no longer part of the experience. You will not be the fastest typist in the world, and this course was never going to make you that. You will be a typist who never has to think about the keyboard again, which is worth a great deal more.

Skills fade if they are not used, but this one fades slowly, and it is kept up by the ordinary business of typing things. A few habits will keep it sharp. Sit properly; the posture from the first lesson still matters. Keep the eyes ahead of the hands. When an error appears, fix it once. And every so often, come back to a check from this course and see where you are. If a number has slipped, the lesson behind it is still here.

• Forty-five words a minute, sustained for five minutes.
• Ninety-seven percent accuracy, corrected or not.
• Backspace allowed, no blocking, one pace from start to finish.

The check is a five-minute timed passage, the same shape as the one two lessons ago, with a higher bar. There is no trick to it and nothing in it you have not typed before. Warm up, find the pace you could hold for ten minutes, and hold it for five. Then close the laptop and go and type something that matters.