Accuracy-First Typing vs. Speed Tests
Most typing practice sites are built around a speed test: type as much as you can in 60 seconds, get a words-per-minute number, try to beat it next time. That's a reasonable goal if the thing you're optimizing for is raw typing speed. It's the wrong goal for copywork.
Quillstead scores every line 70% on accuracy and 30% on speed, and the speed component is capped at a gentle baseline (about 20 words per minute) rather than scaled to adult typing speed — a careful young typist can reach a full score without ever needing to type fast. The design intent, built directly into the app's scoring policy, is that Quillstead "should never pressure speed over getting the words right."
This mirrors the older logic of handwritten copywork: a child copying a sentence by hand was never being timed. The value was in reproducing the sentence correctly — right spelling, right punctuation, right capitalization — not in doing it fast. Typing copywork keeps that same priority; it just moves the tool from a pencil to a keyboard.
Practically, this changes what "good practice" looks like on Quillstead. A slow, fully accurate line is a better result than a fast line with two typos, even though a speed-test site would score them the opposite way. If you want to build raw typing speed specifically, a dedicated speed-typing tool will serve that goal better than Quillstead will — and that's fine. Quillstead is built for a different goal: careful attention to well-written language, one accurate line at a time.