Graduation: two minutes, clean

This is the last lesson of Foundations. If you have passed the checks to get here, you can type every letter, every capital and every common mark of punctuation without looking at the keyboard, and you have the habits that make that reliable: hands at rest, one finger per key, every reach returning home, Shift on the opposite hand. That is not a small thing. Most people who use a keyboard every day never get here.

What you are not yet is fluent, and it is worth being honest about the difference. Fluent typing is typing you do not think about: the words go from your head to the screen and the hands are not part of the experience. It is faster than what you can do now, but speed is the least of it. It is steadier, it recovers from errors without breaking rhythm, and it holds up over a page rather than a paragraph. The Fluency course is about that, and it starts where this one ends.

• Rhythm before speed: even keystrokes, and reading ahead.
• The two hundred words that carry English, as shapes rather than letters.
• The awkward reaches at speed, and how to stop them breaking your rhythm.
• Prose with numbers and symbols in it, and passages you hold for five minutes.

The check below is different from every check before it. It is timed: two minutes, and the attempt ends when the clock does, wherever you are in the text. It does not block on errors, and you may correct with backspace, which is how real typing works. The target is twenty-five words a minute at ninety-five percent accuracy. Take a breath first. You have done all of this before.