[phaedrus]

When I was still in school I scored over 900 on a reading speed test. For those skeptical how this is possible, I don't read linearly my eyes make saccades and groups of words come piling into my brain like someone dumped a bucket of Scrabble tiles. There seems to be a long "pipeline" wherein the words from different lines and different order in the sentences get reassembled into meaning. After reading something very quickly if I look away the information is sort of still "digesting" for some time.

(I seem to have a good size memory buffer for this which no doubt has to do with enabling the speed reading. I remember in typing class classmates were amazed that the way I transcribed assigned text was to read a half a page or more and type it all out verbatim before going back for another chunk. Until they pointed it out I didn't think that was anything special.)

I will admit that at 900 WPM I wasn't getting 100% of the material (albeit enough to get 90% on the comprehension test - which is less than 90% of the source material, just enough source material to reconstruct 90% of the gist). I was really trying to see how fast I could go, since it was computer graded and I could gamify it. (I did get a different text to read and questions to answer about it each time; I wasn't re-reading the same text.) Through this same exercise I learned my comfortable reading speed was 200 - 300 WPM and speed reading without loss of comprehension (just requiring effortful concentration and/or impatience) was around 500.

As an adult I'm certain my reading speed is NOT that fast anymore, and I often find myself re-reading text I just read.

[prisenco]

| my eyes make saccades and groups of words come piling into my brain

That's similar to a tactic speed readers: looking at spaces between words instead of the words themselves, which allows your brain to pull in multiple words at once. There's a pile of approaches and not all are useful, but that one is. Another I've found is quieting my inner voice.

Without doing any practice or any other speed reading methods, just doing those two things boosted my wpm to 500+ at 100% comprehension when I was younger. I was a good reader to begin with but not a particularly fast one. I stuck with those methods because they're effortless and I didn't want to lose comprehension by pushing faster.

And importantly most of what I read is fiction, and a faster speed feels as though it would ruin the feeling of stories that are more ponderous. I prefer the speed of the thoughts on the page to feel like they're real time with the characters thinking them.

[btilly]

This all sounds very familiar, except that my coordination is not enough for typing quickly. That's because of an unrelated neurological problem though.

I'm limited to something like 40-45 WPM.

And the 900 wpm minute is simply about what I find comfortable for a story where I want to know what happens next.