How fast do you read?

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The worst is people who think they can read fast with comprehension, and they can't... There is one person at work who seems to do this in email. About half of the responses I get, I immediately wonder if the original email was read at all.

I recently got one response that said No, and then went on to agree with me.

My reading speed is extremely variable. I have a lot of attention defecit trouble and I often find myself turning written words into (imagined) spoken words, but not taking in the meaning, my mind wanders. But sometimes I latch onto the wavelength of the book and it goes in quickly.

I'm much better if I interact with what I'm reading, with comments or just summarising the plot. That slows things down to a crawl of course, but the info has no choice but to go in. To understand, I have to do, not just watch.

It's the same with spoken word recordings, but I don't have to gaze at text or convert it. I'm currently listening to a lot of short stories and dramas, and beginning to focus better on them than I was doing a couple of weeks ago.

I'm also learning to reject books and recordings that aren't working for me, rather than ploughing on regardless which can be a painful waste of time, and bad for the self-confidence. I'll either pick something else or wait until I'm in a more receptive mood.

I'm fine with bite-sized chunks of written stuff, and can usually digest a 250-500 word message without much trouble, although I often go very slow and careful. Perceived constraints on my time tend to nag at me if I contemplate anything big, but I usually resist that for friends.

Last edited by ToughDiamond on 04 Aug 2012, 2:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

3424 wpm with 82% comprehension but only for when I have to scan, comprehend and analyse a large number of scientific papers.

I love reading so if i find a good book it should be enjoyed and I'll take my time (one comfort item I always have to have is a book). Have to agree with Callista you have to appreciate good writing and a nicely worded phrase.

Just reading what the site had me ready normally, without skimming over it, I got 879 wrods per minute. What I do is take in the entire paragraph, when I read. Not just word by word, or even sentence by sentence.

824 wpm

189 wpm, but I could do better if I had silence instead of being in a room with a crazy old woman who has been watching a country music collection infomercial for almost half an hour. <_<

So my reading speed is low, but I got 100% comprehension. Pretty much the results I expected. I mentally say everything I read and make sense of everything on its own and in context as I go. My deep comprehension level is part of why I read slowly.

I don't even know how that is humanly possible, I clicked start on the page, then done about 5-8 seconds later and it was in the 4000 wpm range, it's not a large article to read, but I don't think someone could read it in only a few seconds. You would have to be purely skimming and not soaking in the actual information.

If its your run of the mill novel, 300-500 pages I can finish it pretty easily, comprehending everything in 1-3 days, usually one day if I enjoy it and have enough spare time. On the other hand, if its actual literature, such as The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace I'll take a long time because I'll take notes and the pages tend to have thrice as many words as regular novels. I think TBK took me a month to finish.

If a book isn't too hard to read yet sucks and is drowned in over-descriptive prose then reading becomes a chore and I'll take a week or two to finish. The closest example I can think of is Battleship Yamato.

It can be done if you have the sort of visual processing that will essentially swallow an image whole--you're likely to have "photographic memory" or something close to it as well. You process visual data at a very low level, rather than turning it into symbols first... You're not reading a word at a time or even a line at a time; you're taking in whole paragraphs, almost like a computer scanning print. But thinking about the information, understanding it, integrating it with what you already know, will take longer and may be done after you're done reading.

I don't do this myself to any great degree, but I do have the experience of being able to look at something and process it later, as though I've taken a mental snapshot and only later on examined it. I can see how someone with even more atypical visual processing might take "snapshots" of entire pages at a time, if they needed to read really quickly.

Seems to me that this tendency could be useful, but would also be associated with visual processing problems and visual sensory overload vulnerability.

Last edited by Callista on 04 Aug 2012, 9:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Speed reading kind of sounds to me like speed eating or speed sex...

I don't feel like that is quite a description of me - I feel like I do convert them to symbols (my thought process is hard to explain, but its concept oriented so it only has one low level conversion there ).It feels like what happen with me is that I process all data simultaneously in a lot of situations.I tend to parellelize processing even when people don't expect it to happen. That's part of what happens when I'm reading - I am reading and processing what I last read, at the same time and such. I suspect I'm even reading multiple things at the same time. I might also read in larger chunks - but I don't get to entire paragraphs (or well I can't say for sure I don't but I'm almost certain I don't). I also max out at 5000 wpm, and people who really go the way you're describing can get even more absurd.

I do know my boyfriend's mom reads even faster than I do and will do almost exactly what you describe there, except she parses larger areas than paragraphs - she can look at a page in 2 or 3 places and have the page read. She can read between 5000 and 10,000 wpm is my boyfriend's estimate. She's ridiculously fast.



Overload vulnerability. Yes. Very yes.

This isn't just visual for me. I do these types of things generally. It's easy to tell with visual because reading speed is an easy place to see it. And an easy place to see the visual overload is this past month. I've been moving for the past month. We scheduled a month for the move so as to make it less stressful and so we could try to even give ourselves a schedule and such. Instead the schedule turned into "a month of Tuttle having a meltdown every time she looked stuff trying to pack until it was almost completely done and she was able to actually help".

Because my sensory processing method is to process everything and every detail until I'm so overloaded that I break and either go into meltdown or shutdown, while also having rather strongly hypersensitive senses, I am very prone to overload. It also leads to abnormal processing in positive ways, and ways that are just me being me.

Wow, ok, that's pretty interesting. I just can't fathom myself ever being able to read a sizeable book in only a few hours, so immediately assume most of the population is like that. I have never really paid much attention to how many words people can read per minute.
I think I'm quite a fast reader, but nothing compared to some of you here, at least not if I want to process the information, haha.

244 WPM and 100% comprehension. I'm sure I could get it to at least 245 under the right conditions.

my brain works slowly: 296.

I read at 408 words per minute and my comprehension is 73%.

Wow. You could break the world record with that, it's around 4000.