Jacobs who wrote about his read-a-thon titled The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (2004). If one were to read the entire printed edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (2002), consisting of 32 volumes, 33,000 pages, and 44 million words, it would take a reader 153 days. And Ammon Shea, a life-long logophile, did just that in one year and wrote a book about it ( Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages). If one were to read the entire second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), printed in 20 volumes with 21,730 pages and containing over 59 million words, it would take a reader about 205 days (reading 24 hours a day), resulting in a very exhausted, bleary-eyed individual albeit, one with a very expansive vocabulary. ![]() ![]() But we digress…Įschewing the seemingly steroid-enhanced performance of speed readers, let us use the 200 per minute as the basis for our calculations. The whole point of reading is to savor the words, the cadence and rhythm of the sentences. Who says muggles don’t have magical powers? Harry Potter novels aside, it doesn’t make sense to speed read a great novel it’s like gulping down a bottle of fine wine. World champion speed reader Anne Jones of England read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows in 47 minutes at an astonishing 4,251 words per minute. At the World Championship Speed Reading Competition contestants read as fast as 1,000 to 2,000 words per minute at the expense of comprehension that drops down to 50%-40%. ![]() Readers who skim, can read at about 500-800 words per minute, but comprehension drops to about 60%. The average reading speed of an adult is 200 to 250 words per minute with a high comprehension rate (70-80%).
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