The average person’s reading speed is slower than commonly thought

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/06/13/most-comprehensive-review-to-date-suggests-the-average-persons-reading-speed-is-slower-than-commonly-thought/

by EndXA • 7 years ago

51 66 7 years ago

digest.bps.org.uk

withdavidli• 7 years ago

article: normal was thought to be 300wpm, meta analysis of new study says it's 238wpm, also speed varies between languages.

Never got tested for reading speed in school like the article says some schools do. That's good for me as I would have failed the 300wpm mark.

Tried speed reading software in high school and college, my normal speed is around 150-200wpm. Even with faster skimming sessions it never got over 450wpm and reverts back to my normal range when not using software. Learned to be okay with it as it seems my comprehension / memory were optimal at my normal range.

eagsalazar2• 7 years ago

I wonder if reading rates have simply been declining in recent years because of phones, computers, TV, etc.

CydeWeys2• 7 years ago

Alternatively, they could be increasing it. Computers have been exposing people to a lot more text in the modern technological era than they would've seen prior to it.

strikelaserclaw3• 7 years ago

yes but how many people read whole articles rather than short bursts of text like comments, tweets, statuses, emails etc...

dvdkon• 7 years ago

I read a lot on my computer and phone. I could see the point with TV, but I think saying that reading speed is declining and that computers are to blame is ridiculous.

Anecdotally, I've found computer literacy or usage skill to strongly correlate with the speed of reading and skimming. While it takes me or another computer enthusiast seconds to find an option in a busy menu, it may take some others a minute, which is a clear disadvantage.

cecilpl23• 7 years ago

I spend a fair amount of time walking users through new-to-them tools. These are all people who use computers for their 9-5. Some people are able to find a named option in seconds, and others struggle. I witness people moving the mouse down the menu like they are reading each entry in order, sometimes even going past the one they're looking for, at which point I usually point it out.

I (and I assume maybe you) have a way of taking in the whole menu at once and pattern matching to the visual image of the word in my head. I don't read the words, I look for a visual match. The target word jumps off the page as quickly as if they were color coded.

noir_lord4• 7 years ago

I read quickly and have the same retention rate (or better) than most people I've interacted with.

I don't do any of the tricky stuff that 'speed readers' do.

The only thing I'm aware is different is I don't hear the words in my head when I read as I'm often 'reading' a chunk of 3-4 words at once.

I thought this was completely normal til I spoke to an ex about it when she commented I demolished books.

7952• 7 years ago

A family member is deaf and does exactly the same thing. He never learned to read aloud so never got into the habit. He reads ridiculously fast.

falcolas• 7 years ago

Yeah, based on a very informal survey I’ve seen on some reading-related subreddits, the biggest difference between fast and slow readers was whether they subvocalized or not.

I fall in the “not” category (the average-sized book is a 3-4 hour length for me), but I will occasionally intentionally subvocalize, just to slow myself down a bit.

dbmueller• 7 years ago

Is this categorization (subvocalizers vs others) backed up by research?

Can on learn not to subvocalize?

cnasc• 7 years ago

I fall in the “not” category (the average-sized book is a 3-4 hour length for me), but I will occasionally intentionally subvocalize, just to slow myself down a bit.

This is what I do, though sometimes it's a second pass over a passage that I want to savor or really focus deeply on.

dorfsmay• 7 years ago

I'm an extremely slow reader. I read probably most books about this subject, but am unable to absorb material if I don't subvocalize.i see words, chunk of words, but they don't connect to each other and I get no meaning.

I've wondered if this is one of those thing that if you have not learned how to do it before a certain age, your brain can no longer learn it, like seeing in stereo etc...

imjustsaying2• 7 years ago

I read words aloud in my head. However, I remember reading words as fast as possible almost like an auctioneer when we would break up into reading groups in elementary school. My classmates thought it was hilarious but when the teacher came by, she would tell me not to read so fast.

So I switched the extra processing power to making context-appropriate inflections, dramatizations, and intonations instead of the monotone my classmates were doing, which the teachers seemed to tolerate.

cecilpl23• 7 years ago

context-appropriate inflections, dramatizations, and intonations

I do this too, and other people often comment on how well I read out loud.

I often find myself buffering words into vocalization while I read ahead a line or so and prepare the next sentence. I can insert pauses (or intone a clause as an aside) to make it easier for the listener to parse.

What tricks do you have?

gowld3• 7 years ago

You comment seems a bit defensive about your teacher inspiring you to improve your reading performance skills.

Your teacher probably tolerated monotone because your classmates were working hard just to get the words out, and they weren't ready to add inflection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjtPMiumixA Don't Read Like a Robot - Blazer Fresh | GoNoodle

saberience2• 7 years ago

I often hear people boasting about their "speed reading" skills and then I ask them what sort of books they read, turns out speed reading and having "good retention rate" is easy if you're reading crap. I could also speed read Clive Cussler, Stephen King, and JK Rowling.

I love Philosophy and classic literature and I've yet to meet anyone that's managed to speed read Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", and then tell give me a detailed description of the plot, themes, artistic merit, and so on. Similarly with books like Ulysses. There's no possible way to speed read that book because it's so rich with allusions, references to religion, art, mythology, and philosophy. If you tried to "speed read" it, you would be missing half the point of reading it in the first place.

Reading great books isn't about numbers, you don't get rewarded for how many classics you read in a year. Reading great books is about slowly absorbing all the riches inside, something that just cannot happen if you're rushing. I've read The Brothers Karamazov and The Magic Mountain 4 or 5 times and each time I learn something new and gain a deeper understanding of psychology and life. I find it more rewarding to read and re-read the classics slowly, writing notes, using a critical guide (or book of companion essays), than smashing through as many crappy novels or modern popular non-fiction books (The Power of Now of any of Malcom Gladwells books are typical fodder for todays readers).

nickthemagicman• 7 years ago

I completely agree. I can read incredibly fast however I've attenuated my reading speed over time to appreciate richness of text and think deeply about the ideas that are being communicated. At some point the actual technical part of reading becomes trivial and the ideas become what's important.

qwsxyh• 7 years ago

This is legitimately the most pretentious HN comment I've ever read, and that's a very high bar.

I too dismiss things that people enjoy as "crap" because I have such a gigantic brain from reading philosophy and looking down everyone else, and belittle them for believing that they read and understand fast in the wrong type of book.

cecilpl23• 7 years ago

Speed reading seems have become a point of pride for many people. I think they see it as a proxy for intelligence rather than a learned ability that is very useful in some (not all) contexts.

Buldak• 7 years ago

I have a similar attitude toward audio books. When someone claims that listening to an audio book is largely the same as reading it, it strikes me that this could only be true of books which aren't especially demanding in terms of comprehension. The idea of listening to audio book of Hegel or using an audio book in lieu of textbooks to study for school seems crazy to me.

paulpauper• 7 years ago

I think it's highly correlated with IQ. It happens that people with higher IQs read faster and and have better comprehension as demonstrated, for example, = by verbal score on the SAT.

le3dh4x0r2• 7 years ago

IQ is a highly outdated concept and making wild assumptions about correlation unscientific. Reading becomes more effortless with practice.

wodenokoto• 7 years ago

I don't do any of the tricky stuff that 'speed readers' do. The only thing I'm aware is different is I don't hear the words in my head when I read as I'm often 'reading' a chunk of 3-4 words at once.

That IS the tricky stuff speed readers do.

EndXA• 7 years ago

The original article is available at: https://psyarxiv.com/xynwg/ (note that it's a preprint, and hasn't yet been subjected to peer review)

Abstract:

Based on the analysis of 190 studies (17,887 participants), we estimate that the average silent reading rate for adults in English is 238 word per minute (wpm) for non-fiction and 260 wpm for fiction. The difference can be predicted by the length of the words, with longer words in non-fiction than in fiction. The estimates are lower than the numbers often cited in scientific and popular writings. The reasons for the overestimates are reviewed. Reading rates are lower for children, old adults, and readers with English as second language. The reading rates are in line with maximum listening speed and do not require the assumption of reading-specific language processing. The average oral reading rate (based on 77 studies and 5,965 participants) is 183 wpm. Within each group/task there are reliable individual differences, which are not yet fully understood. For silent reading of English fiction most adults fall in the range of 175 to 300 wpm; for fiction the range is 200 to 320 wpm. Reading rates in other languages can be predicted reasonably well be taking into account the number of words these languages require to convey the same message as in English.

no_identd• 7 years ago

I think words per minutes seems like a highly problematic metric, for a variety of statistical logics reasons.

Instead, I think we should try to measure multi-word expressions (MWEs) per second, and consider special characters (including spaces!) as words.

Why? Well, to start with, due to us already knowing about the Auerbach-Estoup-Yule-Zipf-Pareto-Mandelbrot-Simon-Price Law(s) only holding for multi-word expressions, not for phonemes, words, characters or syllables. Can't dig up the papers on that right now, tho.

(Personally however, I suspect that MWEs per second ain't the be all, end all, of reading speed, either. It ignores concepts like Paronomasia & Polysemy, as well as even more obscure things, like Polyphonemes. I just so far lack sufficient knowing of any possibly plausible hyperparameterizations which'd generally let one compile some metric for further complexity reductions.)

I'd elaborate on /how/ that (partially) answers the "why", but I lack the time to do so at the moment.

BlackCases• 7 years ago

I never took a speed reading class, but I do know how to recognize when a author -- of any book -- starts blathering on or tries to motivate. I can read whole pages in an instant in those circumstances.

friedman23• 7 years ago

In fiction when an author has an entire page of technobabble I just subconsciously skip the entire thing and only go back to read if the rest doesn't make sense.

LifeLiverTransp• 7 years ago

There worst scifi books are the post famous price ones.

The author has a contract, all competition has been eternally removed from his mindset. He made it. Finally he can, drone on and on about some obscure infodump he found.

Or even worser, show it to those upper class snobs & critic, who claimed that writing good characters and prose is as far out of the league for sciFi, as if it where burried at a rainbows end.

LarryL• 7 years ago

Most people read VERY slowly, because they were taught to do so (at school)!

That's something that makes me angry, because reading fast is a HUGE advantage in every setting (even taking into account the speed variability, depending on the topic).

I'm a very fast reader. To give you an example, I can (easily) read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings in english during during the weekend (2 days), and english is not my first language. In comparison, my brother, who has a LOT in common with me (including education level, and going to the same school as a child), reads pretty slowly and would never be able to do that. My dad and others members of the family are also very fast. BUT, we all learnt by ourselves: basically, we -somehow- managed to NOT learn the WRONG way that the teachers were teaching us (mostly: by "talking in our head when reading"). My mom told me that as soon as I started reading I was very fast.

To me, french lessons (middle-school, early 80s) were _torture_ because of that: the teacher assumed that we read slowly, and we would spend hours while a student was reading out loud; myself I was already 3 chapters later (because I was reading silent during his/her loud reading, I simply COULD NOT read that slow!). When we were assigned a new book (usually a couple hundred of pages), I read it in an hour. But the teacher did NOT understand that there were such huge differences between students. It was painful! In the end, my conclusion is that (because of stupidity) reading fast was de facto discouraged. :-((

I forgot to mention that I'm NOT talking about skimming (reading in diagonal with a severe -and acceptable- loss of understanding), when I skim I'm up to 10 times faster. I'm talking reading with almost total comprehension (barring remembering unimportant details like "the color of the cape of Frodo when he left the Shire", or whatnot).

Of course, it must be said that reading speed is a _meaningless_ concept by itself.

Your speed will (obviously) vary A LOT depending on the _context_: are your studying? Trying to memorize? Reading for leisure? Reading in a foreign language? Tired? What is the text's complexity/level? What is your education level? Etc.

Average speed does NOT exist without context. And most articles on the subject fail to put that context into account, it's even worse in the comments...

=> Of course, this article (and the study) detail the importance of that context.

So, every time I read an article about "reading speed", I know that it's going to be painful in the comments, because people who comment -almost- NEVER take the context into account.

BTW, one of the most infuriating things EVER is that in comments, you ALWAYS have a few people with an elitist attitude who raise the "but you are not appreciating the text if you read too fast", they fail to understand that I don't read poetry like a technical book like a children book, etc. Then you have the "you CANNOT understand if you read fast" crowd, because they don't know what is possible, they assume that their speed is "normal", when it's NOT, they cannot understand that they have been taught to read slowly...

Yep, that topic is one of my pet peeves ^^

cheerlessbog2• 7 years ago

Assuming the LotR audio book is 45 hours you must be reading twice as fast to finish it in two long days at the weekend. Sure, I could read it that fast - meaning that mechanically I could probably decode the text as if the tape was double speed - but it would be a miserable experience because I would have no time to contemplate what was going on, to visualize events, to think back to previous passages, and so forth. It would be like watching a movie at double speed - we can all do it, and legitimately say we "watched" the movie, but it wouldn't give most of us pleasure.

ksdale2• 7 years ago

I think this is exactly the point of people having different reading speeds, though. What is uncomfortably fast for one person is normal speed for someone else, including considering all of the implications of each sentence they're reading. I don't know that I could read the LoTR in two days, but I do know that the pace of audio books is painfully slow for me. My natural speed would be substantially faster than the audio book and I wouldn't be racing through at an unpleasant pace.

And I believe what the parent was trying to say was that we've been conditioned to believe that a certain speed is normal, when perhaps most of us are capable of reading (and fully comprehending) at a much higher speed, though I don't know enough to have an opinion on that.

egypturnash• 7 years ago

"You should take just under two-and-a-half minutes to finish reading this blog post."

Does that include the time taken up by dismissing the "subscribe!" pop-up, and figuring out where you were when you got distracted by that?

kazinator• 7 years ago

Didn't see that at all (I'm a user of the NoScript browser extension that allows JS only from explicitly whitelisted sites).

I went through the content in about 30 seconds. What I remember:

1. "People read at closer to 240 wpm rather than 300 as was previously thought."

2. This was from a meta-study gathered over various studies spanning the twentieth century, in various languages based on the Roman alphabet.

3. There appears to be some variation in reading speed dependent on language.

adverbly• 7 years ago

I was just under two minutes and I'd have added the following by memory:

- Spanish readers are faster than English

- A key reason for the discrepancy between previously measured reading speeds and the new results is recreational vs test-style assessment. Basically it sounds like people read faster when they are being assessed on their reading.

- It should take about 2 minutes and 30 seconds to finish reading the article.

And then doing a 30 second skim a second time I would have added the following:

- Reading speed depends on if the text is long or short. Shorter text can be much slower.

- Reading speed declines with age.

A third skim and I'd add:

- this is important for assessors, who shouldn't expect everyone to read at 300wpm.

Looking back and comparing my notes across the three reads I actually remember recognizing each one of those points the first time through, but I didn't reliably remember them all after each run. I almost think this might have more to do with the way that memory works than the way reading works.

HlessClaudesman• 7 years ago

It's not a race.

hellllllllooo• 7 years ago

My issue is concentration. Once an article looses my interest I find it very difficult to keep reading without skipping chunks. Do others find it easy to read things that they aren't interested in but have to read for work etc.? As someone who used to have to read a lot of academic papers for my PhD I found my mind wandering a lot and often impossible to make it through some content.

strikelaserclaw3• 7 years ago

I think everyone experiences this to some degree, especially when reading technical stuff, you kinda take in what you are interested in/ think will be useful and skim over the rest.

soulofmischief2• 7 years ago

I can read blazingly fast. I used to read sometimes two books in a day, and I destroyed the fiction section in the library of every school I went to.

But now I mostly read non-fiction, and in light of the fact that I remember maybe 8% in detail of the thousands of books I've read, I like to take things very slowly. I'll read a paragraph, stop, think about what I just read, and sometimes read it again just to help things stick.

I break up long articles into multiple sessions, and after each session I try to recall in detail what I just read, and try to form insights and draw connections which help to cement the data into my brain.

If I'm skimming for information, sure, I'll just churn over the text as fast as possible-- But these days I'm reading for knowledge's sake and not escapism. And even when I read fiction, I like to exercise my visual memory and try to imagine every last detail while I read at a leisurely pace.

I see nothing wrong with this approach and thusly I think WPM outside of a desk job is meaningless and not some number corresponding to intelligence that we should be trying to maximize.

Mirioron• 7 years ago

And even when I read fiction, I like to exercise my visual memory and try to imagine every last detail while I read at a leisurely pace.

You just made me realize that people can and do read fiction without visualizing the majority of things that happen in a story. That suddenly explains so much as to how some people read fiction so quickly.

soulofmischief2• 7 years ago

I used to visualize basic whisps of the scenes, what each character looked and sounded like, I guess I've always liked to visualize while reading... in fact I can still very lucidly recall tons of visualizations from more than a decade and a half ago as if they were scenes in a movie, a real testament to the storytelling ability of those authors.

But now I try to spend more time than before. I try to really soak in every paragraph. Whereas in school I took pride in being the most prolific reader around, there isn't much room in my adult life for such competitive, external motivations. Now the stimulation I receive from art and literature stems from my appreciation of the artist's prowess.

osrec• 7 years ago

I have always been a slow reader. My younger siblings would often finish books or articles a lot faster than me. Turns out, I'm a more careful reader than them - I would spot spelling mistakes in text where they would miss them. They'd also misinterpret texts due to speed, where I wouldn't. Not sure what's better, but I do personally prefer the slow and considered approach to reading.

carapace• 7 years ago

Kind of a tangent, but I've had fun experimenting with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), a technique where words are displayed one-at-a-time at the same location and you don't move your eyes.

With a little practice I got to the point where the reading material was entering my brain faster than I can normally think.

Apologies for the link, wikipedia article on RSVP is garbage (rare, but it happens.)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-apps-could-t...

le3dh4x0r2• 7 years ago

Reading speed is highly correlated with the difficulty of the material. And even this factor varies from person to person because of different backgrounds and interests. For me reading speed and a quiz on the material afterwards are useless indicators of someone's overall speed. Every person should read as fast or as slow to full grasp the material.

strikelaserclaw3• 7 years ago

I kinda read slowly but once i've read something i'll remember the important parts for a long time. When i read, my mind converts the words into a sort of movie, maybe this process isn't conducive to speed reading.

3131s• 7 years ago

Although the number of studies involving non-English languages was too small to draw any firm conclusions, there seemed to be a hint of differences between languages. For example, reading rate in the five Spanish studies was considerably faster than the average, at 278 wpm, while the average rate for the 144 English-only studies was 236 wpm.

It really doesn't make sense to compare wpm across languages.

The average person’s reading speed is slower than commonly thought

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