Reading Matters

Perhaps you have seen it as well, the online pieces that in the vicinity of the title suggest the time it will take to read. Helpful, I suppose. Hey, you can read this one while the oven counts down the final five minutes on the pecan pie. Or, during an oil change. Or as you idle in the car line, waiting on a child’s school day to end.

My blog entries run nearly always between 300 and 500 words. Not sure why that is except these are blog posts spit out in half an hour to 45 minutes. If I have to do any research, well that slows me down a bit. And there is the issue of my attention span, shortening by each passing half-decade.

I did a quick review of reading speed estimates via the web. Generally, average adult readers are pushing along at 250-300 words per minute. Friends, if so, that rate would go a long way toward explaining how it is the average American reads around a book a year.

Of course, either one book or two, unless one finished and the second one tossed out several pages in. Averages, don’t you know.

Consider the following titles: A Game of Thrones, 298,000 words; Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 76,944; Of Mice and Men, 29,160; Macbeth, 17,084; and, Pride and Prejudice, 122,685.

Doing some basic arithmetic, 300 wpm is 18,000 an hour. So a little under 100 minutes for Steinbeck, closing in on 7 hours for Austen. A Game of Thrones? Around 16 and a half hours. And you have to figure in some water breaks, and so some water works, too, then.

Begs a question or three, in my mind at least, illiteracy being one. UNESCO currently projects the US at a 99% literacy rate.

USA, USA, USA!

Wait. That’s still well over 3 million of us illiterate.

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, 21% of our fellow citizens score at the very lowest level for prose reading, 23% the lowest level for document reading, and for good measure, 22% landed in the lowest proficiency level for quantitative work—math.

But now we’re talking comprehension, not just speed. One out of five readers between 15 and 64 are going to struggle. Seems reasonable to think wpm rates are slowed.

Maybe 5 or 6 hours for Of Mice and Men. Think of it. I say this having a pretty good sense who my readers are. Then consider some of the following landing places for your charitable donations.

Reading is Fundamental https://www.rif.org/about-rif

Room to Read https://www.roomtoread.org/

Reading Rockets http://www.readingrockets.org/resources_new/c604

Local public and school libraries.

And Donors Choose—teachers often ask for book sets. https://www.donorschoose.org/

Here’s reading with you, Kid.