This is a genuine question, even though it sounds competitive, but reading is not a competitive sport lol:
Do people typically only read one word at a time? Or…?
I am checking out this Readwise Books app (which seems very cool so far btw), and it tracks WPM and other stats, and there’s a little feed you can explore showing what people on the app are reading like current live sessions, past sessions. And all of these sessions are like 190 WPM, 150 WPM, even in Readwise’s marketing the highest they show is 318.
I’m reading I, Robot in the app currently, and my session showed 541 WPM, and I thought I was reeeally taking my time on this one, re-reading to commit to memory, listening to the words aloud in my head, etc.
This legitimately is just something I’ve never thought about before. Probably like me not thinking about aphantasia being a thing until someone described it? I have no idea how it would even be possible for me to spend more time reading something, and one word at a time is the only possible explanation I can come up with??
@jonah
FWIW, I read clumps. Each word is linked to the half dozen around it.
This is not necessarily a good thing. It's an instinct I've had to fight to parse quality literature.