How many words can you write legibility in one minute?

Could you maintain that rate for an hour or more?

For comparison, consider commercial, and some railroad, telegraph operators from one century ago. They could maintain 40-50 words per minute with beautiful penmanship while copying the messages of the clacking sounder. The 1916 book Autographs and Memoirs of the Telegraph describes one of the best who could maintain 55 wpm. BTW, the book tries, in part, to "perpetuate the beautiful penmanship of the telegraph operator."

At the turn of the century, Dodge's Institute of Telegraphy in Valparaiso, Indiana had a 6-month telegraph operator course that included typewriting and "drill-penmanship" because it was "necessary that telegraph operators make a legible copy." FYI, a 1908 book breaks down the total cost for tuition, materials, room, board, etc. of $98 or less. Operator salaries were about $50 to 75 per month.

Also, a type of non-cursive speed printing (up to about 40 wpm) was taught professional and amateur telegraphers as late as the 1970's. If I can't find a chart, I'll write one out and do a scan.

Any speedsters out there?

Bill

Wow Bill, those telegraph guys must have been quick . I tend to be slower with FP's and that's all I use now. I write cheques even more slowly.
Gary

I write around 50-60 wpm normally, I never realized I was fast.

Edit: This is legible with some familiarity to my writing. I can clean it up if I write a bit slower, but slowing down too much makes it even worse again. Go figure.

Very interesting topic -- I was just thinking about that tonight as I was writing into what passes as my "journal." I have been reading some web posted scans of captain's logs and been very surprised to find how legible they are. I was wondering how quickly they were actually written -- they appear to be by a quick hand.

Another thing is that I think of my journal writing as being like "piano practice". I used to practice the piano for hours -- never got very good at it, but there is quite a bit of difference in speed and precision between a bad pianist and a good one. Handwriting must be the same. Some, like the telegraphic writers must be phenomenal, others less so. I'm neither very quick nor very legible (but working on it). Still, I'm interested in where I am on the bell curve.

Here's something interesting, though. When I write in my journal, I write the time I begin an entry, and very often, the time I end the entry. Dunno why I do that, but that will allow me to calculate the number of words per minute I write, and also give me an idea of the legiblity to speed ratio. I probably won't get to this until the weekend, but if I get a decent sample, I'll report back.

And of course, from now on, I'll remember to put both the begin and end time on all entries. Anyone wanting to participate in this investigation can do likewise and report back. No padding! What do you think?

Doug

Hi all,



May I kindly question that? -- Or is it simply so that
we do not mean the same thing with words-per-minute
nowadays as then?

In Sweden we used "characters-per-minute". In the so called
good old days, we'd get a Gold Medal if we managed to
send and receive code at a speed of 125 Chars-per-minute.

My personal record (the diploma still hangs above my bed)
was 175 Chars-per-minute. In my world that would translate
into 35 WPM (a 'word' = 5 chars), and believe you me,
there most certainly was no "beautiful penmanship" involved :-)

Here is how we had to write:


Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

http://www.algonet.se/~claesg

Claes is absolutely correct. Code reception is generally measured using a 5-character word average. Additionally, if you qualified at 25 wpm in the military using cipher groups, you would be doing the equivalent of about 30 wpm (20% increase) on a civilian test that used mostly plaintext. This is because of the lack of dominance of the shorter sounds of the common letters.

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" averages less than 4 characters per word.

When I first learned the code, I was taught speed printing. I've attached a sample showing the strokes, although my instructors taught me the "wrong" E and H ;-) My printed E tends to look like a C-. How Claes was taught the E is faster and less likely to be misread.

Later as my speed increased, I taught myself to copy using cursive, then eventually with the typewriter. Now most of my cursive capital letters are not cursive.

Railroad telegraphers mostly used a stylus instead of a pen or pencil in order to penetrate multiple carbon layers of train orders. Stories, probably a bit exaggerated, were circulated about one operator who supposedly could write the word Philadelphia sixty times in one minute!

Bill

I am a bit confused as to the surprise. I think if I practiced it I would be able to come close to that Philadelphia sixty times a minute feat. I think writing as small as I do helps.

That signature over there takes me probably two thirds of a second.
<-----

My signature takes me 1.5 of a second and is ilegible.

I have no clue what my words/characters per minute are, but I imagine that if 30-40 wpm sounds "slow" it must have something to do with having to hear and translate the code/"clacking" being received. I imagine that it's not quite the same thing as writing out our own thoughts or even transcribing someone speaking. Again, I've got no clue, just my thoughts.

Best,
Rich

As I said in a previous reply, I usually write the time I start an entry into my journal, and the time I end the entry. I'll go dig through my journal later this weekend, but I just laid a page of noodles down just now and timed the entry and counted the words. It comes out at 289 words in 10 minutes, so around 29 words per minute. This seems fairly consistent with most of my current journal entries because it seems I take about 10 minutes per page, with 28 to 31 lines of text per page.

The cursive I'm using is quick, not very pretty, easily readable for me, and probably pretty readable for a third party. (I'm working on a post regarding defining cursives by function and hopefully will post that this weekend, but this is pretty much what I would describe as "journal cursive.")

I use unlined sketchpad with a little too much tooth for the Namiki Falcon. I could get better speed on this side of the paper using my Pelikan, but I just gassed up the Falcon and wanted to take it for a spin.

Anyway, 29 wpm. I'm wondering how this compares with the others here. I think there will be a fairly wide variation depending on the legibility of the cursive and the individual's thought processes, etc.

If others report in, I'll collect the data. Anyone?

Bill, by the way, thanks much for your thread starting post. The story (and history) of these telegraphers revealed in your (brief) post is fascinating to contemplate.

Doug

OK- IT'S SLIGHTLY OFF TOPIC but I hope of some interest:

I'm a licensed amateur radio operator (K2RRR) and had to pass a morse code test at 20 WPM to obtain my current license. BTW, I'm not active on the amateur radio bands at this time.

When studying the code for this particular class of license, I used computer generated code groups of five characters each, sent at speeds up to 40 WPM. While this made copying text sent at 20 WPM much easier, I found that I had come to anticipate a pause after every five characters. It took a while to overcome this. My handwriting, while legible, was just barely so!

In plain text communications, particularly among operators using higher speeds, one tends to "hear" a pattern of characters as a common word rather than as individual characters.

For anyone interested in hearing what this sounds like, or in learning the code, I think that the program offered by G4FON is quite useful. More information may be found HERE

Morse code practice programs are often included with or easily compiled into various Linux and *nix distributions.

73 de K2RRR

(Translation: Best Wishes from K2RRR)

After marking the begin and end times in my "journal" entries, I went back and actually counted the words and divided it by the number of minutes spent. I'm usually in the high twenties -- quickest was 31 wpm. Of course, that includes "thinking" time, but my journal shows very little of that going on. With practice I figure I can get consistently into the 30's.

I'm using a modified italic. I'm guessing the loopier forms can be written faster, so I'm very interested in the style and speed of others here.

Doug

I could write faster when I was younger. My signature is 14 characters, and takes me 10 seconds. Once, my signature was rejected because it was legible.

I think I can write very fast and stilll legibly, but slowing down defenitely improves the legibility! ( video of speed in the hands in motion thread ).

Re:

"How many words can you write legibility in one minute?"

I've only ever calculated speed in legible-letters-per-minute, because words differ so much in length. (If I write "Run, dog, run!" and you write "Accelerate, Rottweiler, accelerate!" in the same time, we've both written three words but certainly we did not write at the same speed.)

I write 110-150 legible letters per minute (I call it LLPM), with the variation depending on mood, state of health, how big I want to write at the moment (large writing takes longer because the pen must move further to make each letter), etc.

If we reckon an average word as 5 letters, this works out to 22 - 30 legible words per minute. Most of my students can do beter than I do - I've had students write at 180-185 LLPM - for myself, I can only say that I came very late to good handwriting (age 24) and suffer some neurological deficits.

"Could you maintain that rate for an hour or more?"

I can write at 110 - 125 LLPM for an hour or more. Put me on the low end of the scribes' bell curve.

Re:

"I'm using a modified italic. I'm guessing the loopier forms can be written faster ... "

Though some (not all) people write "the loopier forms" faster, most people find that they cannot *legibly* write the loopier forms faster. Writing *legibly* with loops takes more time than writing equally legibly without loops."

Re:

"Once, my signature was rejected because it was legible."

That happened to me, too! (The guy at the bank didn't object to the legibility _per_se_, but to the fact that he didn't think my signature varied enough between one check-signing and the next. He thought I'd used a rubber stamp, so he called me up to tell me to "stop using a stamp" and to sign my name instead. I didn't change my signature, but the bank - as it happened - did go out of business shortly thereafter. Since then - over 15 years - I've had no problems with people doubting my signature.)

Concidence? Incompetence displays many different symptoms.

You've reminded me of a story about a spy. He used several aliases, and signed documents using a variety of names. When he signed his real name on cheques, his real signature varied so much that his bank kept querying it.

I agree with you, its not really fair to see how many words, maybe it sould be LLPM instead. I can do about 185-195 LLPM (about 39 WPM), but in an exam, I did about 30 wpm, solidly for 2 hours. Maybe it might change if I counted all the letters....

I was afraid the bank wouldn't accept my signature as well, but thank god they did!

Shaun

In the long run, maybe the best we can do is to determine an approximate average speed. If there was, say, a World Speedwriting Championship, the contestants would have to copy identical text. Otherwise, one competitor might get an overabundance of "e" letters while another had more of the "t" or "x" or "j" letters. On top of that, the judges determining legibility might be influenced if plain text was used; for example, "bright sun" vs "bright sum" makes one guess an "n" rather than an "m".

If my name was Bo Doe, I could sign checks really fast ;-)

But I do agree that LLPM is certainly more "fair" than simply counting words.

You would think that the telegraphers could measure their receiving (or sending) speeds more accurately than with handwriting. However, an average 5-character plain text word takes less time to send than 5 random characters. In the International Code that is used in radio (also known as the Continental Code) the character "e" is nearly 1/10th the length of the character "0" (zero). So some text is easier to copy.

The language the U.S. railroad and landline commercial telegraphers used is called American Morse (clicks/clacks rather than dots/dashes). The sound and spacing are different, some of the characters are different, and the word per minute rate is different.

As georgem says, high speed telegraphers hear the sounds of the words. Conversations can take place without any writing at all.

About 10 years ago in St. Louis I spent a delightful evening with one of the last railroad telegraphers. A younger collector who learned of him through study of American Morse set up an interview for us. The elderly gentleman was frail and had difficulty talking. Eventually, we hooked up his old mechanical speed key (not like the electronic keyers of today) to a live sounder we brought. His fingers started moving and years simply melted away from him as he smiled and some of the most expressive and rhythmic communication, albeit hesitant at times, filled the room.

Bill

Thanks for posting, this made me smile