Can't seem find any definitive answer to this. What is the "official" way of doing it for touch typing purposes?.
If it's calculated by saying a word is 5 characters of text do spaces count? Some sites even reduce your WPM for every mistake that's made regardless of whether you correct it, this is totally wrong imo.
What if you're half way through the last word, is the partially completed word taken into account?
I assume that means correct characters or keystrokes in which case characters are the same as keystrokes, when is a keystroke not a character? Just asking. Is shift a keystroke?
I still don't agree with reducing wpm for typos, who's measuring efficiency? All that matters is that you reproduce the given text as fast as possible, your own typos are naturally going to slow you down, why penalize even further for no reason?
So I'm just going to calculate it as (text length / 5) / minutes taken which seems to inflate my personal wpm a tad.
Detracting typos obviously makes sense, no matter whether you correct them, or not, because again, it's a measure of your efficiency.
No it doesn't - this can be easily seen once you pick units for efficiency. If it's correct characters per second, obviously the correct measurement is... correct characters divided by seconds, regardless of typos made. If it's correct characters per keystroke, then obviously the correct measurement is... correct characters divided by number of keystrokes, etc.
In the end, we have two cases. If efficiency is words per minute (or is proportional to it), then the correct measurement is just... words per minute, since that already takes into account time taken to correct the error. If efficiency is not words per minute, it has no business fudging that number up.
I too think it's meaningless in this day and age to penalize typos as long as the test demands correct copy with no errors. They carry their own penalty then, slowing you down and breaking your flow. Anything beyond that is typewriter legacy as davkol pointed out.
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