I believe I can read nicely formatted easy fiction at about 500 - 600 wpm. I also believe, through experience in professional environments, that I'm at about t

I believe I can read nicely formatted easy fiction at about 500 - 600 wpm. I also believe, through experience in professional environments, that I'm at about the top of the bell curve in terms of reading speed in my native language. I don't meet many/any people to the right of me on a day to day basis. My position is not that surprising: while I didn't get to start coding at 5 like some people with early access to computers, I certainly got to start reading early: my parents effectively had a library of books, we had frequent and regular trips to the library as a child to pick up a stack of new books each week or two (it was considered a treat), and I was repeatedly being told to stop reading in polite company, turn the light off and go to sleep, etc etc etc. This speed slows down significantly for technical articles, and I've often told people they should get used to having to read some 5 or 6 times, and shouldn't feel stupider/behind the pack if they have to do so. If they don't have to do so, it suggests they either already have experience with the material being presented, or its not that dense/new/hard/original. Most people in academia/corporate aren't reading/understanding the articles anyway, no matter what they say, which is of course our society's dirty little secret: image over doing... Anyway... My conclusion is that speed reading (significantly beyond this speed barring all but MAYBE in the rare case of cognitive/physical mutations) is effectively bunkum, because I've never seen it: and yet it just keeps popping up like a kind of zombie-myth that just won't die. I've also found you quickly get into the comprehension/read-speed debate with "speed readers", to which my general response is actually very similar to programming algorithm efficiency: You can't speed up a computer, but you can change the amount of work it does. If your definition of speed reading is lowering your comprehension, to me, "lowering comprehension" is just another way of saying "not reading". So i'll say that again as a rule of thumb: if your comprehension of a piece is dropping below the 100% you'd achieve normally, that's not called "speed reading", its called "not reading".