Fact · Typing and writing speed
1.2times
Average silent reading of non-fiction is about 1.2 times as fast as the overall rate of conversational speech.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
- What it measures
- Compares silent reading of non-fiction with the overall conversational rate. Both are averages across different studies and tasks.
- How it is calculated
- 238 / 196 = 1.21
Calculated from
- A meta-analysis of 190 studies with 18,573 participants estimates the average silent reading rate for adults in English at 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction.
- In large corpora of conversational telephone speech in English and Chinese, the overall average rate was 196 words per minute, counting all elapsed time.