What Is a Good Reading Speed? Average WPM and How to Choose

How fast do adults read?

A 2019 meta-analysis by psychologist Marc Brysbaert pooled 190 studies with more than 18,000 participants. Adults reading silently in English averaged about 238 words per minute for non-fiction and about 260 for fiction. Reading aloud averaged about 183.

Reading speed varies with the text. Familiar subjects and narrative prose tend to read faster than technical vocabulary and dense arguments.

Research on speed and comprehension

Reading involves a trade-off between speed and accuracy. A 2016 review of reading research by Keith Rayner and colleagues concluded that speed-reading programs are unlikely to deliver what they advertise: pushing well past a normal rate generally costs comprehension, and no technique removes that trade-off.

In a 2014 study by Elizabeth Schotter, Randy Tran, and Keith Rayner, words were masked after the reader’s eyes moved past them, preventing rereading. Comprehension was worse than in normal reading. Strobe’s passage view lets you return to earlier text.

How to measure your own speed

Choose a few pages of prose you have not read before, at the level you usually read. Read normally for three to five minutes, count the words you covered, and divide by the minutes. To count words quickly, paste the passage into Strobe’s New Text screen, which shows the word count before you add it.

Without looking back, write two or three sentences about the passage to check what you retained.

• Use material similar to what you usually read.
• Read the way you usually do, including any rereading.
• Repeat with two or three texts and use the middle result.
• Measure fiction and non-fiction separately if you read both.

Choosing a starting pace for RSVP

Start an RSVP reader near your measured speed rather than at the top of the range. If you read about 240 words per minute on a page, 250 to 300 WPM is a sensible first session. Strobe starts new documents at 300 WPM, and you can change that default in Settings; each document remembers its own speed.

Raise the pace in steps of 25 to 50 WPM, reading a short passage at each setting.

Strobe separates two kinds of speed change. The slider at the top of the reader sets the document’s speed. While you hold to read, dragging up or down changes the speed only for that hold, which suits a dense paragraph or an easy stretch without changing the document’s pace.

The number on the slider is a base rate

In an RSVP reader, the WPM setting defines how long an ordinary word stays on screen: at 300 WPM, one fifth of a second. Timing features then adjust individual words. In Strobe, Smart Timing gives longer words more time and Punctuation Pauses hold commas and sentence ends, so with either one on, a passage takes longer than its word count divided by the WPM.

Complexity Timing can shorten or lengthen a word’s display time. Library reading-time estimates use the remaining word count and base speed, excluding timing adjustments.