My Journey to Improve my Typing: Part Three

In the third edition of my journey, I am exploring monkeytype.com. I had taken a break from typing over winter break, so starting again was double the challenge. 

This website has several features, and most are customizable. The first thing you see is the typing home page, where you practice typing; a leaderboard, with typing information of all the users so you can compare statistics; an info page, showing the statistics of the website as a whole itself; and a setting pages where you can do all of the customizations for your experience on the website. To save your typing progress and customizations, you can make an account, which I did.

On the typing page, there are even more ways you can practice by not changing the game mode. There is a little toolbar near the top of the page where you can either type by word count or by time and you can pick different amounts to alter the test. You can opt to type with or without numbers and punctuation for word amount or time option. There is also a quote option, where you type different quotes, and a  zen option which is just free typing. The last option is custom, where you can choose what phrase you want to type.

The whole layout of the website is a simple and dark color palette that is aesthetically pleasing and organized, which is something I felt typingtest.com didn’t have. It was very busy. Once I found out how to change color palettes, I did. There are so many different sets and fonts to choose from.

What monkeytype.com doesn’t have is a place where you can learn how to type. It also does not have features to let you know what finger presses what key like many other typing websites have. This one is more of a fun game than a learning place. This was unfortunate for me because I am still trying to learn and know and remember what fingers go where for the more obscure keys. It however was good practice. 

I did my first typing run for the website and I did it by word count of 50 with no punctuation or numbers and got 56 wpm. This is high and really good for me until you consider that when I used typingclub.com, I had only learned how to type with no punctuation, so I do better without it included in the practice. 

After you complete a test, it shows you the various statistics of how well you did, which they call the result page. There are also a couple of different options you can choose from: go to the next test, restart the test, practice problem words, toggle word history, watch a replay, or take a screenshot of the results. 

Out of the entire website, there is only one place where there is an ad. It is on the result page after you complete a test and it normally doesn’t show up because I am my school profile for my laptop. This is the default setting which can be changed in the settings, from no ads to “sellout” where there are multiple ads on each page. While on the school profile, there will be a space that says ads or restricted, but no ads will show up where there would normally be one.

One mode I tried out was the no-space mode. It gives you all the words just without any spaces. I chose to try this out because I have the habit of adding a space after every word I type, even when it isn’t needed, which makes the process slower because I have to delete and retype. 

I did very poorly. After a few tries of getting used to punctuation and no spaces, I got a wpm of 26, which is very low. I need to work on my consistency between different modes of typing.

I overall really liked this website, but I don’t think I am good enough at typing to use it. It would be my favorite if it had a section for learning so I could use it to improve enough to use the website. Everything else about this website is top-tier. I am just not a skilled enough typer to use its many useful and unique features.