In a modern world where time is money, how have our reading habits been influenced? Are we reading more quickly or do we prefer to read short passages? The answer perhaps lies in the kind of text you're reading.
When we're reading online, we read quickly to search what we want. Does this mean that as readers we now have far less patience than we used to? Not necessarily. Much of this activity is actually skimming or scanning to check whether something is useful or interesting and whether we want to read on. We'll slow down and take a bit longer to properly read the text if the headline catches our eyes.
For those writing for an online environment, this means finding more useful ways of catching the readers'eyes. For example, putting the key information at the very beginning makes it more likely that the time-poor website visitors will find what they want.
But what about when we're reading literature, are the rules still the same? The average reader works their way through a piece of an article at no more than about 250—300 words per minute, which is generally a page of text. If you try to read through a novel more quickly, then you start to lose a lot of what makes literature such a pleasure.
When we read for pleasure, we are much less focused on picking out useful information or key words. Instead, the language itself is as important as the information mentioned. The longer you spend reading a passage, the more vivid a picture you create in your mind.
Sometimes an escape from the fast-moving Internet Age is just what we need, so maybe it's time to slow down and lose yourself in a good book.
