[LarryL]

Most people read VERY slowly, because they were taught to do so (at school)!

That's something that makes me angry, because reading fast is a HUGE advantage in every setting (even taking into account the speed variability, depending on the topic).

I'm a very fast reader. To give you an example, I can (easily) read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings in english during during the weekend (2 days), and english is not my first language. In comparison, my brother, who has a LOT in common with me (including education level, and going to the same school as a child), reads pretty slowly and would never be able to do that. My dad and others members of the family are also very fast. BUT, we all learnt by ourselves: basically, we -somehow- managed to NOT learn the WRONG way that the teachers were teaching us (mostly: by "talking in our head when reading"). My mom told me that as soon as I started reading I was very fast.

To me, french lessons (middle-school, early 80s) were _torture_ because of that: the teacher assumed that we read slowly, and we would spend hours while a student was reading out loud; myself I was already 3 chapters later (because I was reading silent during his/her loud reading, I simply COULD NOT read that slow!). When we were assigned a new book (usually a couple hundred of pages), I read it in an hour. But the teacher did NOT understand that there were such huge differences between students. It was painful! In the end, my conclusion is that (because of stupidity) reading fast was de facto discouraged. :-((

I forgot to mention that I'm NOT talking about skimming (reading in diagonal with a severe -and acceptable- loss of understanding), when I skim I'm up to 10 times faster. I'm talking reading with almost total comprehension (barring remembering unimportant details like "the color of the cape of Frodo when he left the Shire", or whatnot).

Of course, it must be said that reading speed is a _meaningless_ concept by itself.

Your speed will (obviously) vary A LOT depending on the _context_: are your studying? Trying to memorize? Reading for leisure? Reading in a foreign language? Tired? What is the text's complexity/level? What is your education level? Etc.

Average speed does NOT exist without context. And most articles on the subject fail to put that context into account, it's even worse in the comments...

=> Of course, this article (and the study) detail the importance of that context.

So, every time I read an article about "reading speed", I know that it's going to be painful in the comments, because people who comment -almost- NEVER take the context into account.

BTW, one of the most infuriating things EVER is that in comments, you ALWAYS have a few people with an elitist attitude who raise the "but you are not appreciating the text if you read too fast", they fail to understand that I don't read poetry like a technical book like a children book, etc. Then you have the "you CANNOT understand if you read fast" crowd, because they don't know what is possible, they assume that their speed is "normal", when it's NOT, they cannot understand that they have been taught to read slowly...

Yep, that topic is one of my pet peeves ^^

[cheerlessbog]

Assuming the LotR audio book is 45 hours you must be reading twice as fast to finish it in two long days at the weekend. Sure, I could read it that fast - meaning that mechanically I could probably decode the text as if the tape was double speed - but it would be a miserable experience because I would have no time to contemplate what was going on, to visualize events, to think back to previous passages, and so forth. It would be like watching a movie at double speed - we can all do it, and legitimately say we "watched" the movie, but it wouldn't give most of us pleasure.

[ksdale]

I think this is exactly the point of people having different reading speeds, though. What is uncomfortably fast for one person is normal speed for someone else, including considering all of the implications of each sentence they're reading. I don't know that I could read the LoTR in two days, but I do know that the pace of audio books is painfully slow for me. My natural speed would be substantially faster than the audio book and I wouldn't be racing through at an unpleasant pace.

And I believe what the parent was trying to say was that we've been conditioned to believe that a certain speed is normal, when perhaps most of us are capable of reading (and fully comprehending) at a much higher speed, though I don't know enough to have an opinion on that.