20-minute typing tests for advanced practice
The 20-minute typing test is primarily used by candidates preparing for steno-typist, personal assistant, and stenographer-grade exams where sustained performance is essential. It is also used by professional typists and medical transcriptionists who routinely type documents longer than 1,500 words.
At 20 minutes, the key challenge shifts from finger fatigue to cognitive load — you need to read, understand, and reproduce text accurately while maintaining speed. This dual-task demand is exactly what separates casual typists from professionals. Use the hard or very-hard difficulty setting on TypingMonk to simulate the complex vocabulary found in real professional documents.
Why medium difficulty is the standard
The medium difficulty typing test represents the vocabulary and sentence complexity of everyday professional English: business emails, news articles, general office documents. It is the format used by most employment typing assessments and the basis for most published WPM benchmarks. When someone says "I type 65 WPM," they almost always mean on medium-difficulty text.
Medium passages include a mix of common and moderately uncommon words, varied sentence lengths, and standard punctuation including commas, periods, and quotation marks. They challenge you to read slightly ahead of where you are typing — a key skill for professional typing speed.