How to choose your reading speed in words per minute

Every RSVP reader gives you a dial with a number on it. Freadly’s goes from 100 to 1000 words a minute. The first question people ask is where to put it, and the honest answer is that it depends on you, the book and the day. Still, a few facts make the choice less random.

What is a normal speed?

The best number I know of comes from Marc Brysbaert, a psychologist at Ghent University. In 2019 he published a meta-analysis that pooled many studies of silent reading in English by adults. The averages were about 238 words a minute for non-fiction and about 260 for fiction. Those are averages, so plenty of healthy readers sit well below or above them.

A few things shift the number:

• Difficulty. A textbook chapter is slower than a thriller.
• Purpose. Reading to remember is slower than reading to find out what happens.
• Language. If English is your second language, expect a lower figure, and the same goes for any language you read less often.
• Familiarity. A book you have read before goes faster than a new one.

A figure you see online, “the average reader reads 200 to 300 words a minute”, is in the same range as the study, which is why it gets repeated. Treat it as a ballpark and not a grade.

Words per minute on a normal page and in RSVP are not the same thing

On paper, 250 words a minute is an average over a whole page. You skip some short words, linger on a hard sentence, go back when you lose track. Over a minute it nets out.

In an RSVP reader the number is a setting. At 250, a word arrives about every quarter of a second whatever it is. You cannot linger. So many people find that their comfortable RSVP pace is a bit lower than their natural page pace for hard text and noticeably higher for easy text. Some sit close to the same number. The only way to know is to try.

Freadly adds a little give. Words stay a bit longer at full stops, commas and paragraph ends, and long words get extra time. So when you set 300, the average over a chapter is 300, but a single sentence will not arrive at a constant beat.

Find your starting point

Freadly has a calibration test: you read a short passage as you normally would and press Done when you finish. The app divides the words by the time and rounds the result to the nearest ten. It ignores very short attempts, such as an accidental double tap, and results outside a plausible range for ordinary reading. Before you install anything, you can check your pace with the free reading speed test on this site: a short text, three questions, your words per minute.

Two tips for a better number:

1. Read something typical for you, not your fastest or your most careful. Calibration should describe an ordinary Tuesday.
2. Do it when you are awake. A test taken late at night in bed will give you a lower figure and a pace that feels too slow in the morning.

You can repeat the test whenever you like. The Stats tab shows your calibration as a line, and your actual reading pace is plotted against it, so you can see whether you are ahead of your baseline or behind it.

Pick a pace you can summarize

Here is a simple test that does not need an app. Read a page at a given speed, look away, and say in one or two sentences what happened. If you can, the speed is fine. If you cannot, slow down by about 10 percent and try again.

For most people that gives three zones:

• Comfortable: you could do this for an hour, and you notice details and phrasing.
• Working: you are slightly stretched, you follow the story, and you would not want to do it all day.
• Skimming: you catch the general shape and some key words. You would not be able to answer a quiz.

Use the comfortable zone for books you love, the working zone for books you want to finish, and the skimming zone only for text where a rough idea is enough. This lines up with what the research review by Rayner and colleagues concludes: speed and understanding trade off, and no technique removes the trade.

Raise it in small steps

If you keep reading at the same pace forever, you will keep getting the same result. If you jump 100 words a minute, you will lose the thread and decide the app is not for you. Small steps work better. Freadly moves the dial in steps of 25, and a similar size is a good rule on any device.

A few habits that help:

• Move up when a session felt easy, not when you feel like it.
• Stay at the new pace for several sessions before moving again.
• Go back down on days when you are tired. That is not failure; that is using the dial.
• Raise it first on easy material, such as a novel you already know, and later on denser text.

Freadly’s training mode automates this. The pace rises by 10 words a minute every 5 minutes during a session, so you drift upward without touching anything, and you can pause or lower it when the text gets hard. For a longer plan, the Pro training programs run 14, 30 or 60 days and are built from your calibration, with pace check-up tests along the way. Days one to seven of any program are free.

Watch the trend, not one day

A single session tells you very little. Sleep, noise, the book and your mood all show up in the number. What matters is the line over a few weeks.

The Stats tab shows minutes read each day against your goal, and a pace chart for the week, with longer views (month, year, all time) in Pro. If your pace creeps up while you still understand what you read, the practice is working. If it rises and you cannot summarize the chapter, the number is lying to you. Go back a step.

The screenshots on this site use demo data, so please do not compare your curve with them. Your own line is the only one that counts.

A reasonable plan for week one

1. Take the calibration test. Write the number down.
2. Read for 10 to 15 minutes a day at about 10 percent below your result. The goal is to get used to the one-word display, not to go fast.
3. After three or four sessions, move to your calibrated pace.
4. After another few sessions, try 25 words a minute higher on an easy book.
5. At the end of the week, look at the stats. Keep the pace that felt comfortable.

That is it. No tricks and no promises of tripling anything.

Where Freadly fits

Freadly is a reader for iPhone and iPad (iOS 26). The one-minute calibration, the pace dial and training mode are free. If you try it, start slow, give it a week, and let the numbers follow.