Every few months, an article goes viral about reading speed. The headline is usually something like “The Average Person Reads X Words Per Minute: Here’s How You Compare.” The comment sections fill up with people bragging about how fast they read, people confessing they’re slow readers, and people insisting that speed reading is a scam. I’ve read enough of these discussions to have developed a theory, which is that our obsession with reading speed is mostly a waste of time and energy, and that the thing your reading speed actually tells us about you is, with a few exceptions, nothing meaningful at all.

But I want to dig into this properly, because the topic is more interesting than the hot takes suggest. Reading speed touches on questions about cognition, education, culture, and the very nature of what it means to “read” something. So let’s do this.

What the Numbers Say

The commonly cited average reading speed for English-language adults is somewhere between 200 and 300 words per minute. This number comes from various studies conducted over the past century, and it’s reasonably consistent across the research. College-educated adults tend to read a bit faster, around 250 to 300 words per minute. Speed readers claim rates of 1,000 to 2,000 words per minute or more. Some claim rates even higher than that.

Here’s the thing about those speed reading claims: they mostly don’t hold up under scrutiny. A comprehensive review published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2016 examined the evidence for speed reading and found that, while people can certainly skim text at very high rates, their comprehension drops significantly when they do. The tradeoff between speed and comprehension is not a training problem that can be solved with technique. It’s a fundamental constraint of how human cognition processes language. Your eyes need time to fixate on words. Your brain needs time to parse syntax and construct meaning. You can push the speed up, but you lose understanding as a consequence.

This doesn’t mean speed reading courses are entirely useless. They can teach useful skimming strategies for situations where you need to extract specific information from a text quickly. But the promise of reading a full novel at 1,500 words per minute with full comprehension is, based on the evidence, not realistic for the vast majority of people.

The Things That Actually Affect How Fast You Read

If average reading speeds don’t vary as dramatically between individuals as the internet would have you believe, what does affect how fast someone reads? Several things, and most of them have nothing to do with innate ability.

The difficulty of the text is the most obvious factor. I read a thriller at maybe 350 words per minute. I read a dense work of philosophy at maybe 100 words per minute. Same reader, same eyes, same brain, wildly different speeds. This is because different texts make different demands. A thriller uses simple, direct prose and familiar narrative structures. Your brain can process it quickly because it’s doing less work per word. A philosophy text introduces complex ideas, unfamiliar terminology, and arguments that require you to hold multiple propositions in mind simultaneously. Your brain slows down because it has more work to do.

Familiarity with the subject matter also plays a huge role. An economist reads an economics paper faster than I do, not because she’s a faster reader in general, but because she already knows the concepts and vocabulary. She doesn’t have to pause to figure out what “marginal utility” means. She doesn’t have to reread a sentence because the logical structure is unfamiliar. Background knowledge acts as a kind of reading lubricant: the more you know about a subject, the faster you can process text about it.

This, incidentally, is one of the strongest arguments for reading widely. People who read across many subjects build up a base of background knowledge that makes all their subsequent reading faster and easier. It’s a compounding effect. The first book you read about, say, evolutionary biology is slow going. The tenth is noticeably easier. By the fiftieth, you’re reading at a pace that would seem impossibly fast to the version of you that struggled through the first one.

Your physical environment matters more than most people acknowledge. Lighting, noise level, comfort, time of day: all of these affect reading speed and comprehension. I read fastest in the morning, in a quiet room, with good natural light. I read slowest in the evening, on a crowded train, with overhead fluorescent lighting. The difference is substantial. If I tested my reading speed under those two conditions, I’d get results that differed by thirty or forty percent, and neither number would be a meaningful measure of my “real” reading speed because there’s no such thing.

The Cultural Baggage of Fast Reading

I think the reason people care so much about reading speed is that our culture equates speed with intelligence. Fast readers are presumed to be smart. Slow readers are presumed to be, if not unintelligent, then at least less capable. This assumption is woven into our educational system. Students who read quickly are tracked into advanced classes. Students who read slowly receive remediation. The implicit message is clear: faster is better.

I think this is largely wrong, and I think it does real harm to people who happen to be slower readers. There are many reasons someone might read slowly that have nothing to do with intelligence. They might be reading in a second language. They might have dyslexia or another reading difference. They might simply be reading more carefully, pausing to think about what they’ve read, making connections to other things they know. A slow reader who deeply engages with a text and remembers it five years later has, by any reasonable standard, “read” that text more successfully than a fast reader who blew through it and forgot it by the following week.

I’ve known people who read extremely fast and retained very little. I’ve known people who read slowly and could recall specific passages from books they’d read decades ago. Speed and comprehension are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable does a disservice to both fast and slow readers.

The Goodreads Problem

I want to talk about Goodreads for a minute, because I think it has done more to warp our relationship with reading speed and reading quantity than any other single platform. Goodreads, for those unfamiliar, is a social network for readers. You log the books you’ve read, rate them, write reviews, and set an annual reading challenge: “I want to read 50 books this year” or whatever number you choose.

The reading challenge feature turns reading into a game with a quantifiable score. And games, as we know from every other domain, encourage optimization. People start choosing shorter books because they count the same as long ones toward the annual total. People start skimming or even abandoning books that don’t hold their interest, not because they’ve made a conscious decision about how to spend their time, but because the unfinished book is holding them back from their number. People feel guilty in December when they’re at 43 out of 50 and the year is running out.

All of this is insane. Reading is not a competitive sport. There is no trophy for reading more books than someone else. A person who reads five books a year and thinks deeply about each one is doing something more valuable (in my opinion) than a person who reads a hundred books a year and forgets them all. But the Goodreads interface, with its progress bars and year-end statistics, creates an implicit hierarchy where more is better, and the easiest way to read more is to read faster.

I deleted my Goodreads account three years ago, and my relationship with reading improved immediately. I stopped counting. I stopped feeling guilty about slow books. I started rereading things I’d already read, which Goodreads discourages because you can’t log the same book twice as a “new” read. Rereading is one of the great pleasures of a reading life, and it’s economically irrational, which is why a platform built on quantification doesn’t support it well.

Fast Reading vs. Slow Reading: A False Dichotomy

The conversation about reading speed tends to split into two camps. On one side: speed reading enthusiasts who believe you can and should read faster, and that doing so will make you more productive, more knowledgeable, and more successful. On the other side: slow reading advocates who believe that the only real reading is deep, careful, contemplative reading, and that speed reading is a bastardization of the whole enterprise.

Both camps are wrong, or more precisely, both are right about some things and wrong about others. The truth is that different texts demand different reading speeds, and a skilled reader adjusts their pace constantly. I skim the news. I read emails at moderate speed. I read poetry slowly. I read contracts very slowly. I read novels at whatever pace the prose demands, which varies chapter by chapter and sometimes sentence by sentence. This isn’t a technique I learned. It’s something every experienced reader does naturally, and it’s what reading speed discussions completely miss when they try to assign a single number to something that’s actually fluid and context-dependent.

The best readers I know aren’t fast readers or slow readers. They’re flexible readers. They can tear through a page-turning thriller at high speed when the situation calls for it, and they can sit with a single paragraph of Proust for ten minutes when the situation calls for that instead. The speed isn’t the point. The responsiveness to the text is the point.

What Your Reading Speed Actually Tells You

So, after all of this, what does your reading speed say about you? I promised in the title that the answer was “probably nothing,” and I’ll stand by that with a few qualifications.

If you read significantly below the average range (well under 150 words per minute) and you find reading effortful and exhausting, that might be worth investigating. It could indicate a vision problem, a reading disability, or some other issue that a specialist could help with. This is not a value judgment. Some of the most brilliant, creative people I’ve known have been slow readers due to dyslexia or other differences, and they’ve found ways to work with their reading speed rather than against it.

If you read within the normal range, which is most people, your speed is telling you nothing useful about your intelligence, your education, or your character. It’s telling you roughly how fast your eyes and brain process written English, which is determined by a mix of practice, familiarity, and cognitive factors that are largely outside your control.

If you read significantly above the average range, congratulations, but this also doesn’t tell you much. You might be a more experienced reader. You might process language slightly faster than average. You might just be a better skimmer who misses more than you realize. Without a comprehension test alongside the speed test, a high reading speed is a number without context.

What I Actually Care About

I work in publishing. I care about reading. And what I care about, specifically, is not how fast people read but whether they read in a way that gives them something. That “something” could be knowledge, pleasure, comfort, excitement, a new perspective, a phrase that sticks in their head for years. None of these outcomes are correlated with speed. A reader who takes three months to finish a novel but thinks about it for the rest of their life has gotten more from that book than a reader who finished it in two days and moved on immediately.

When I acquire a book for ScrollWorks, I never think about reading speed. I think about whether the book rewards attention. I think about whether there are sentences worth rereading, ideas worth sitting with, characters who linger after the last page. The books I’m most proud of publishing, books like The Last Archive and The Cartographer’s Dilemma, are books that get better the more slowly and carefully you read them. They’re not optimized for speed. They’re optimized for depth.

So the next time you see an article about reading speed or someone asks how many books you read last year, feel free to ignore the question entirely. Read at whatever speed you read. Read whatever you want to read. Read it twice if you feel like it. The only metric that matters is whether the reading is doing something for you, and only you can measure that.

Browse our catalog for books that reward reading at any speed.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We read fast sometimes, slow sometimes, and never count.