![]() ![]() The speed-reading huckster Evelyn Wood claimed that a professor boasted of consuming more than 2,500 words per minute “with outstanding recall and comprehension.” A 1963 study purported to find one person who read 17,040 words per minute. Kennedy was said to read 1,200 words per minute. What about the far end of the bell curve? Isn’t it possible there are a handful of super-smart Aloysiuses out there who can read much faster than everybody else? John F. The majority of these college-level readers reads about 300 words per minute. 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, according to Keith Rayner, a psycholinguist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. That takes roughly 0.3 to 0.5 seconds on average. ![]() After this is repeated once or twice, you pause to comprehend the phrase you just looked at. This is called a “saccade,” and it takes up to about. You move your eye to the next word or group of words. This is called a “fixation,” and it takes about. 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. Within the contentious world of reading theory, there is unanimity on this point. Studies show that people who read at or above the college level all read at about the same speed when they read for pleasure. Aloysius doesn’t read 10 times faster, because Aloysius can’t read 10 times faster. ![]()
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