a passage to copy
The real opening of a real book. Typing it here records nothing — this is a sample, not a session.
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another.nothing is saved — this is a taste. your place is only kept once you start reading.
The Secret Garden · Frances Hodgson Burnett
copywork, on a keyboard
The practice is old and the reasoning is simple: you learn the shape of good sentences by producing them yourself, slowly, exactly as written. On a keyboard it does a second job at the same time, because a real paragraph contains the capitals, apostrophes, commas and quotation marks that generated word lists leave out. That is why a page of a novel feels harder than a typing test — it is harder, and it is the part worth practising.
how a session goes
Work in passages rather than chapters. A few hundred characters is about a minute of typing and a natural place to stop, and the next passage is waiting whenever you come back. Type at a pace where you can stay accurate and let speed arrive on its own — copying a book badly at speed teaches your hands the wrong thing. Ten or fifteen minutes most days does more than an hour at the weekend.
for homeschoolers
Copywork is a fixture of Charlotte Mason-style teaching, usually done by hand and for good reasons. Keyboard copywork is not a replacement for that: handwritten copying does things for letter formation and pace that a keyboard does not. It is the same idea aimed at a different skill, and it suits an older child who already writes fluently and now needs to type fluently. There are no accounts, no advertising and nothing collected, which is usually the next question.
choosing a passage
Pick something you or your child actually wants to read, because the practice only continues if the next passage is one you would like to get to. Shorter sentences and plainer punctuation make a gentler start; long sentences, period spelling and dense dialogue are harder to type than they are to read, which is why the shelf grades books by typing difficulty rather than reading level.
nothing to protect
There is no clock here, no leaderboard and no streak. A passage can be left half-finished and picked up next week with nothing lost and nothing counted against you — which matters more than it sounds for a child, because the thing that ends copywork is usually the argument about it rather than the work itself.
questions
what is copywork?
Copying out a well-written text word for word. Applied to typing it means working through a real book rather than generated word lists, which supplies the capitals, apostrophes, commas and quotation marks that drills leave out.
does copywork improve your typing?
For accuracy on real text and comfort with punctuation and capitals, yes, because you are practising the thing itself rather than an easier proxy. For raw peak speed on easy words, timed drills are more efficient. The useful order is lessons to learn the keyboard, then copywork to make it usable.
is typing copywork a substitute for handwriting it?
No, and it is not meant to be. Handwritten copywork does things for letter formation and pace that a keyboard cannot. This is the same idea aimed at a different skill, and it suits a learner who already writes fluently and now needs to type fluently.
how long should a copywork session be?
Ten to fifteen minutes most days beats an hour once a week, which is the usual finding for motor skills. A passage is a few hundred characters, roughly a minute of typing, so a session is a handful of passages with a natural stopping point every minute.
do i need an account or a subscription?
No. There is nothing to sign up for, no advertising, and nothing collected about what you type. Your place is kept in your browser on your own device, and you can export it from the settings page if you move to another computer.
where the text comes from
these books come from Project Gutenberg, a volunteer library of public-domain works. they are free to use, in the United States and most of the world, at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever — you may copy them, give them away, or re-use them under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License.
our copies are not untouched. we normalise typography (curly quotes and dashes become the ones on your keyboard), fold the occasional accented letter no key can produce, and cut each chapter into passages. a character you cannot type is a dead end in a typing exercise, so nothing here is left unreachable.
Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. they are not affiliated with lowkey type and do not endorse it.