I typed

there was an old man from nan tucket
who put all his cash in a bucket
his daughter named nan
ran off with a man
and as for the bucket, nan tucket

fee fi fo fum,
I smell the blood of an english man!

the rain in spain falls mainly on the plain

there once was a man from nan tucket
who put all his cash in a bucket
his daughter named nan,
ran off with a man
and as for the bucket, nan tucket
[download]

(91 words) in less than a minute. But that seems rather contrived. I think if I were just typing stream of thought, I'd end up around 70/80 words per minute. This:

(11) in fact, it is for this reason that I timed myself
(17) writing something freeform.  specifically, my response
(28) to this node.  this is happening as I write it, so
(36) there is no aforethought, not like with those
(44) limericks and well-known rhymes and what have you.
(54) and I'm making typos too.  and you can see that
(63) natively, I don't capitalize the first word of a
(71) sentence, unless (egotistically) it happens to be the
(77) word "I".  how english of me. ;)
[download]

I wrote in a minute also, and it is 77 "words" long, give or take. So yeah, I'd say I'm around 75 wpm. But this only based on one minute of writing, not, say, ten.

_____________________________________________________
Jeff japhy Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;