[Ninjalawyer]

There was a thread a little while ago that linked to a Staples site that measured how fast you read a short passage (basically, you read the passage, clicked a button when you were done and then answered some basic questions about the passage).

I was a little embarrassed when I took that test and was told that I read better than average (a few hundred words per minute, but I don't remember the figure), but only about what someone who completed high school could manage and well below what a college student could do. Since I did complete university, and read and write a ton for work, I definitely thought I would have done better than that, especially when quite a few people in the thread were seemingly managing hundreds of WPM more. When you're told that you're just okay at one of the few things you think you're good at, it's a real punch in the self-esteem.

Well take heed fellow slow readers! There's a Lifehacker article (here) that has some choice (self-esteem affirming) quotes from a cognitive psychologist and eye-tracking researcher that suggests that: (i) college-level readers generally do 200 to 400 words per minute (yay!); and (ii) most average readers probably can't significantly increase their reading speed without taking a hit to reading comprehension.

Quotes I like:

When you factor out the amount of time spent thinking through complex and unfamiliar concepts—a rarity when people read for pleasure—reading is an appallingly mechanical process. You look at a word or several words. This is called a "fixation," and it takes about .25 seconds on average. You move your eye to the next word or group of words. This is called a "saccade," and it takes up to about .1 seconds on average. After this is repeated once or twice, you pause to comprehend the phrase you just looked at. That takes roughly 0.3 to 0.5 seconds on average. Add all these fixations and saccades and comprehension pauses together and you end up with about 95 percent of all college-level readers reading between 200 and 400 words per minute.

Oh ya, that's just what my self-esteem needed! What else you got for me?

You can probably push yourself to get a little over 500 words per minute, but you're limited by the eyes and the anatomy of the retina. To understand text you need to move your eyes to put the fovea on the part of the text you want to focus. Acuity drops off pretty markedly outside the fovea and you can't discriminate the words and text far from the fovea. So, that's the rate limited factor, as is how fast the brain can process information.

You can practice going faster and you probably will, but when you start going too fast you'll start losing comprehension. Most speed reading methods involve getting rid of subvocalization. Research shows that when you do that and the text is difficult, comprehension goes to pieces.

The obvious conclusion is that those posting scores in the range of 800 to over 1,000 wpm in the last thread are either very good at skimming or (more likely) just outed themselves as superhumans.