To measure your progress in learning to read faster, you first need to be able to measure your reading speed. The way we’re going to do it here is to read for 3 minutes, count the number of words and then divide by 3 to get the number of words per minute. You will need a book, a notebook and pen and a timing device.

It’s better if your timing device has a countdown timer that alerts you when the 3 minutes are up, otherwise you will have to keep looking over to where the clock/watch is. Doing so may slow down your reading.  If a clock or watch is all you have, don’t worry as all we want is a rough idea for comparison with later performance.

Take your book and mark a starting point in a section of text you haven’t yet read and read for 3 minutes. When the 3 minutes ends, mark the point you read up to. Count up the number of words there are in a sample of 3 lines to get the rough average number of words per line. Next, count up the number of lines you managed to read.  Multiply the two numbers together to get the number of words read. Divid this number by 3 to get the number of words per minute.

My reading rate before I started trying to improve was 205 words per minute (WPM).