Writing Speed: Words per Minute by Hand and per Day

Adults copy by hand at about 13 to 23 words per minute, and typing is about 2.3 times as fast ¹. Writing your own words is much slower than either, because most of the time goes to planning what to say ². That is why most writers measure their output in words per day, not words per minute. This guide sets out what each number measures, the studies behind it, and how long a document takes at each speed.

The three speeds are easy to mix up. Copying is measured in words per minute of text already in front of you. Typing a given passage is faster, and composing new text is slower than both, because each word has to be chosen as you go. This guide keeps them apart and cites each figure to the study that produced it.

Writing 1,000 words takes 6 to 125 minutes, depending on the task

The same 1,000 words can take about six minutes or more than two hours, depending on whether you speak them, type them out, copy them or compose them. The table below uses one cited speed for each method.

The first three rows measure how fast words move onto the page, not how fast you think. The last row is closer to what an original document takes, because it includes choosing the words. The gap between the rows is the reason this guide spends most of its length on composition.

Adults copy by hand at about 13 to 23 words per minute

Wikipedia's entry on words per minute gives the adult copying average as 68 letters per minute ¹¹, which the article puts at about 13 words per minute. That figure is a secondary summary of a study we could not open, so treat it as a benchmark rather than a precise measurement.

A more recent measurement comes from a 2014 study of 300 university students in South Africa. The students completed a short copying task, and their speed was counted as words written per minute. The mean was 22.85 words per minute ⁷. The study looked at handwriting problems among these students, and it excluded students with known physical disabilities, so the sample is not every adult.

Instructions change the result. The same paper's introduction cites an earlier short assessment in which copying a sentence gave 26 words per minute when people wrote neatly and 36 when they wrote as fast as possible ¹². If you time yourself, say which of the two you asked for, because the fast version is clearly higher.

Why the adult figures differ

The figures differ because the tasks differ. The norm counts letters, not words, and rests on a cited study we could not open. The student mean of 22.85 counts words in a passage that students copied as part of a short copying task. Neither is a composing speed. When you see a single handwriting figure with no task named, it is probably a copying figure, and it is probably measured on neat writing.

Typing is about 2.3 times faster than copying by hand

Typing is faster than handwriting for most adults. The average participant in a large online typing test typed 51.56 words per minute ⁵. Compared with the student copying mean, that is about 2.3 times as fast ¹. The two figures come from different people and different tasks, so the ratio is an estimate from two separate samples. We found no study that timed the same adults typing and writing by hand on the same text.

Phones narrow the gap. In an online study of 37,370 volunteers typing on their own phones, the average was 36.2 words per minute ¹⁴. That is still faster than the student copying mean, but by a smaller margin than a full-size keyboard. For phone speeds in more detail, see phone typing speed.

At 51.56 words per minute, typing 1,000 words takes about 19.4 minutes of pure keystroke time ⁶. Copying the same 1,000 words by hand takes about 44 minutes at the student mean ⁸. Neither figure includes thinking time, which is covered below.

For typing speeds across the population, read the average typing speed guide. For the research on how typing speed is measured, see how typing speed is measured.

Speech input on a phone is faster still, at about 153 words per minute

In a controlled study on an iPhone, English entered by speech reached 153 words per minute, against 52 on the built-in keyboard ^{3 15}. That is faster than any typing or everyday handwriting figure in this guide. The study counts the finished text, including time spent correcting errors made during entry.

Entry is not the same as writing. The study used short phrases read in a quiet room, and it did not measure editing a dictated draft afterwards. A writer who dictates a first draft still has to find and fix the errors, so the 6.5 minutes in the table above covers entry, not a finished document ⁴.

Yap, which we make, is an on-device dictation app for Mac and Windows. The figures in this section come from the study, not from our product. You can try free speech input in the browser at online dictation. For the trade-offs between speaking and typing at work, see dictation vs typing.

Handwriting speed keeps rising through the school years

School norms show handwriting copying speed rising to about 16 words per minute by the end of middle school ¹³. These are averages compiled from a 1995 norm for children, so they show the trend, not an adult figure. The compiled norms do not show where the rise levels off, so the adult studies above are the better benchmark for an adult.

Composing by hand is slower still. In a 1990 study, fourth-grade students with learning disabilities who composed by hand averaged 4 to 5 words per minute ¹⁶. That is far below the copying rates in the norms above. The samples differ, but the gap fits the pattern in the next section: writing your own words adds a thinking load that copying does not.

How to measure your own speed

Measuring copying and composing separately gives a clearer picture than one number.

1. Choose a passage of about 250 words that you have not seen before, and a page you can copy from.
2. Copy the passage by hand for five minutes at a neat, normal pace. Count the full words you wrote, then divide by five.
3. Repeat with the passage written as fast as you can while staying legible, and note the two results separately.
4. Compose a short paragraph on a topic you know, for ten minutes, by hand. Count the words, then divide by ten.
5. Compare the composing result with the copying result. The gap shows how much of your time goes to choosing words.

Your composing result will be lower than your copying result, and that is normal. The rest of this guide explains why.

Composing runs far slower than copying, because most writing time is thinking

When you write your own text, the words are not in front of you. In a 1978 study by IBM researchers, about two-thirds of the time spent composing a letter went to planning, whether the letter was written, dictated or spoken ². Planning is what separates composing from copying, so it sets the speed of composing more than the speed of the hand does.

Working memory explains part of the cost. In a 2001 study, Kellogg found that planning, translating ideas into sentences and reviewing compete for one general-purpose working memory resource ¹⁷. A faster hand does not remove the thinking that runs alongside it.

Speech software shows the same pattern. An earlier reported composition rate with speech software was 8 to 15 words per minute ⁹, which the same paper calls much lower than normal speaking speed ¹⁸. At that rate, 1,000 words take between 67 and 125 minutes to compose ¹⁰. Treat those figures as a historical floor, not a limit: they come from earlier software, and your own skill changes the result.

People speak much faster than they compose. Normal speaking speed is 125 to 150 words per minute ¹⁸, and in large corpora of conversational telephone speech the overall average was 196 words per minute ¹⁹, though that figure depends on how pauses are counted. Speaking is fast because the words come out as the speaker thinks them, and it is not the same as writing a finished text.

The medium also changes the ideas. In a 2015 laboratory study of 90 participants, fluency on a creative task was higher when ideas were written down than when they were spoken aloud ²⁰. In that task the medium changed how many ideas people produced, so for a writer the choice between speaking and writing may affect what you produce, not only how quickly you produce it.

Published writers report 500 to 2,000 words a day, but no study has measured it

We found no survey that counts the daily output of professional writers. The figures that exist are working habits that writers have reported themselves and that writing sites have collected. Stephen King's daily target is listed at 2,000 words ²¹, and Graham Greene's at 500 words ²². The novelist Sebastian Faulks said in a 2012 interview that his output usually settles between 1,400 and 1,500 words a day ²³.

These figures describe a range of habits, not a norm. Writers also differ in what they count: some count only finished prose, while others include drafts. Check which before comparing numbers.

The figures show something useful for planning. A day of 1,500 words is well under an hour of keystrokes at the average online typing speed ⁵, but composing that many words takes far longer, because most of the time goes to planning ². To estimate a document, count the finished words you need, then add time for planning and revision rather than dividing by your typing speed alone. For the question on daily output in more depth, see how many words a day writers write.

Handwritten notes are not clearly better than typed notes

A widely repeated claim holds that longhand notes help people learn more than laptop notes. A 2019 replication of the original study behind that claim gives a more mixed answer. In the replication, students who took longhand notes did better on factual questions than students who took laptop notes ²⁴. On conceptual questions there was no difference between the two groups ²⁵.

A summary of the replication by the Learning Scientists describes the study. The result is a partial one: longhand notes did better on factual questions, but on conceptual questions the two groups did not differ.

For writing speed, the practical point is simpler. Handwriting is slower than typing for most adults, so notes taken by hand capture fewer words in the same time. If you need a complete record of a lecture, typing is faster. If you want to rephrase material in your own words, the choice depends on what you need to keep. The question of notes in more detail is covered in is it better to take notes by hand or on a laptop.

Shorthand and stenography can keep up with speech, and ordinary writing cannot

Speech runs at 125 to 150 words per minute at normal speaking pace ¹⁸, which is faster than handwriting or typing. Stenographers and court reporters are trained to keep pace with speech. To earn the Registered Professional Reporter credential, a court reporter must transcribe dictation at 180, 200 and 225 words per minute, with 95 percent accuracy on each test ²⁶. For comparison, one Indian state's junior stenographer scheme sets its shorthand skill test at 100 words per minute ²⁷.

Shorthand works by abbreviation. Wikipedia defines shorthand as an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases the speed and brevity of writing compared with longhand ²⁸. Court reporters use a stenotype machine, which records words as key combinations, rather than writing shorthand symbols by hand.

Competition records go further. Handwriting speeds of up to 350 words per minute have been achieved in shorthand competitions ²⁹. Those are records set under contest conditions, not the speed of everyday work. For the trained methods and the tests behind them, read stenography and shorthand.

Where to go next

• Typing speed: the full overview
• Average typing speed by age and device
• Speaking vs typing speed
• How to type faster
• Is typing faster than writing by hand?
• How long does it take to write 1,000 words?
• Dictation vs typing
• Dictation productivity