Some people read at two hundred words per minute. Others read at more than double that. When you learn how to speed read, you start to realize that anything under a thousand words per minute is actually really slow reading. Some people, however, start to take their speed reading a little too far. Some comments on my homepage will show you that a bunch of people are thinking that they can read in the 10,000 or more word per minute range effectively, according to the simple test we provided. I don’t want to discount the effectiveness of our own tool, it is pretty neat, and it works well enough, but let’s just say that the reading material you’re presented with is not exactly the most difficult in the world.
To maintain that kind of reading speed words per minute in a more difficult text would be astounding. I may be an authority of sorts on this subject, but even I cannot read more than 2,000 words per minute on a truly difficult piece of text. While there are some people out there who claim that reading ten or twenty times faster than that is not only doable, but they can do it with 100% comprehension. While doing any kind of actual testing on this may not be altogether fair, I think that a scientific study needs to be performed in order to find out if this is the case. If it were, and someone were to read the bible with 40,000 words per minute (as some people have claimed to be able to do), they would read the entire old and new testament in under twenty minutes. The entirety of Moby Dick could be handled in 5 minutes at 40,000 and only 10 minutes at a much more reasonable 20,000 words per minute. I don’t know about you, but anyone who claims to be able to read that fast, much less comprehending what they are reading, is probably not telling the whole truth.
I have done a few preliminary reading speed tests using my tool on the homepage as well. The text is simple, as I have said, but what’s nice about that is that it allows me to use the same text to test out readers of many different ages. What I noticed immediately was that there was a significant difference between all of the readers in the third grade (8-9 years old) and those in the fifth grade (10-11 years old) who I tested. All of the older readers were able to handle the text just as fast, and most much faster, than the fastest of the younger readers.
Perhaps surprisingly, though, as soon as students enter middle school, there are wide varieties of reading speeds in students. Girls tended to read as much as 20% faster than their male counterparts, and some students in the seventh grade actually read much slower than the fifth graders who took the same tests. Speculations on this have been many, but one explanation is that less reading is often required of middle school students, and the students I tested noted that they were not required to do their own book reports; they were simply required to read the classroom texts or novels only, and had no individual responsibilities. They also noted that they were not taken to the library by their classroom teacher as often, if at all. It is perfectly normal for children of that age, when they all have the same books, that some students will read them, and others will simply talk to each other to find out what happened. Regardless, starting in the seventh grade, reading levels among those in our study tended to start sliding.
This trend continued on and on as students aged, and six months after taking the first test, I was given the opportunity to retest a number of students. Many of them had their reading speed words per minute fall even farther.
What’s more, adults have shown that their careers have a tremendous impact on their reading speed. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, higher paid professionals who managed others tended to have higher reading speeds than those who work for them, and perhaps unsurprisingly, professors, especially those who write books, tended to be the fastest readers of all the groups I tested.
While this is far from a comprehensive scientific study, it does seem to indicate that reading speed is greatly affected by the amount of material you are required to read, and the amount of practice you have in actually reading, either for pleasure or for work. It doesn’t seem to matter which is which, although I have a tendency to believe that those who read more non-fiction tend to be better off, if only because non-fiction writing tends to be more logical and organized, and better for speed reading techniques.
To learn more about this study on reading speed in words per minute, see this article.
One question that needs to be answered, though, is how fast our reading speed should be in words per minute. The number one concern, of course, is comprehension. If you cannot read at close to 100% comprehension, with 80% comprehension as a minimum, then why are you bothering to read quickly at all? Reading speed must be secondary to comprehension, though the two generally do tend to go together. As you learn to read faster, you generally learn to pick up more of the meaning of the words as you go.
Slower readers, those who tend to read around 300 words per minute or less, should probably aim to increase their reading speed to around 1,000 words per minute. Because your reading speed is slower to begin with, there are many obstacles to overcome before you will be able to increase to a maximum reading speed, which is around 3,000 words per minute for the extremely fast readers. Vocabulary must be improved, and so must eyesight and hand dexterity, especially if you are using one of the many hand techniques used in speed reading. For readers who start out faster, at somewhere between 500 or 800 words per minute reading speed, it is very possible to reach 2,000 or more words per minute in only a few weeks of practice.
Anything over 3,000 words per minute is probably impossible for almost all individuals, especially those over the age of 40. However, increasing your reading speed by any amount is preferable to reading slowly.
The best way to increase your reading speed is with speed reading software. You can read our reviews at this link here, or you could just check out our highest rated product, Speed Reader X here.