Whenever you’re learning something new, it’s important to first gauge what level you’re at. This is true in memory training, in musical training, in weight training, and in many other areas as well. Right now, you might think you’re a slow reader, but you won’t know just how slow you are until you take the test.

You should always find out where you are before you decide where you want to go.

So, it’s of course important to test your reading speed before you start your journey of improvement. This serves not only as a measuring tool, but as encouragement!

If you know your regular speed is 200 words per minute, think of how great it’s going to feel when you read 600 words per minute. Think of how right now, you’re used to your reading speed. You’ve adapted to it. Your lifestyle has shaped itself around your reading speed.

Once you start improving, you’ll find that you can read more and more stuff. You’ll start reading twice as much as usual. It’s going to feel great. You may even end up with hours and hours of free time in your day. You’ll be wondering “How did I stay so stressed out for so long? …and why did I put up with it?”

A reading speed test is very simple to design. If you want to set it up on your own, here’s what to do:

NECESSARY THINGS:

• Text you’ve never seen (1 or 2 pages)
• Working stopwatch
• Relaxed self

PREPARATION:

1. Get comfortable in your seat, holding the text on your lap. Don’t look at it yet!
2. Make sure the stopwatch is at 0.0

THE TEST:

Ready, set, go! Start the stopwatch and begin reading.

But it’s not really a race. You should read at your regular speed. Read like you always do. If you don’t read at a comfortable pace, you won’t pass the comprehension test anyway!

When you’re done reading, check how much time it took you. Then, count how many words there were in the text. (This is why it’s not good to read more than 2 pages…)

Reading speed is measured in words per minute (WPM). To get your WPM speed, divide the amount of words you read by the amount of time you spent.

If you spent 3 and a half minutes reading 2 pages, it might look like this:

886 words / 3.5 minutes = 253 words per minute

Once you do that, you have your WPM speed. But don’t get too excited yet, because you still need to do a comprehension test.

Hand the text over to someone you know (and trust!), and get them to quiz you on the content of the article. Or, you can just try explaining it out loud. If you can’t do this well, your comprehension level isn’t high enough. That means that the test over-stated your actual reading speed.

If you pass the test, then congratulations! You now have a measurement of your reading speed. That’s a big step towards improving your reading skills.

After all, if you don’t know how fast you’re reading right now, how do you know how much you can expect to improve? It could very well be that you’re in the position where you could quadruple your reading speed, instead of just doubling or tripling.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that kind of thing before you start? Then, after some training, you can test yourself again, and see how much you’ve improved.

Now, I realize this can be a little difficult (or at least time consuming) to set up for yourself. Nobody likes counting words, anyway! And, I can even hear many of you saying “But Stephen! I don’t have a stopwatch!”

That’s why there’s a Reading Speed Test on this website. The words are counted, the stopwatch can be started and stopped with buttons on the page, and the article is about speed reading, too!

Just press the Start button when you start reading, and press the Stop button when you’re done, and it will calculate your words per minute speed automatically. And, there’s a Comprehension Test already made too, so that you can make sure you understood the article.

And, also worth noting, there is some analysis of possible reasons for your current reading speed (depending on the WPM from the test), which is useful for pinpointing areas for improvement.

Do the Reading Speed Test now!