Do you know those heads-up at the head of an online article, telling you how long it’s likely to take you to read it? I do appreciate those, although they smack of the capitalist obsession with effectiveness and brevity. I want it ALL, and I want it NOW, without actually making any kind of (shiver) effort…
If you feel like those heads-up are always over-estimating your reading speed, fear no more: it’s not you, it’s them. The go-to number in the past was 300 words per minute, but a new meta-study has examined reading speed studies between 1901 and 2019, and has found an average of 240 words per minute for texts in English.
That has implications for assessment (let’s all be more generous with each other, and exorcize this devil of quantification), and also for processing of words in so many ways, visual, linguistic (which language, what script, native language?), cognitive (content? Memory?). It’s interesting that the study finds different speeds depending on the length of texts, and it’s also excluded texts ‘not read for pleasure’.
This all has implications for my project, since I chose Sheffield as host university amongst others because they have the HumLab, a research facility that nourishes interdisciplinary work between scientists and humanities people. That lab has eye-tracking facilities, and I’d like to explore how people read brackets (in prose fiction): do we read through them as if they were not there? (but they are!); do we go back before or after we have arrived at the bracket’s end, and re-read the previous clause? And do we then jump the bracket, or read it again?
So many questions, and possibly so many exciting answers. Or, more likely, more questions…
The digested article is here.