Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this-cybersource.com.au> writes: > spelling or grammatical errors and clumsy writing. *Especially* the > spelling errors, they have about the same effect on her reading speed as > a tree trunk lying across a Formula 1 race track.
Spelling errors are a disaster, somehow they stand out like they use Comic Sans Bold and red ink. Most likely because they break the pattern. I seem to find them more and more often in the books I read, maybe because I use English (my second language) more and more. As for speed reading, there are many levels to do this: one can call scanning a page really fast left-right, moving as fast to the bottom as possible speed-reading, or reading each and every sentence just as fast as possible speed reading. The faster one goes, the more is lost. The total # of pages in Harry Potter seems to be just over 4000 [1]. If an afternoon is 4 hrs, this means 1000 pages an hour, or 17 pages/minute. One has to do skimming to read that fast. With 250 words/page the reading speed would be over 4K words/minute, which would make your wife a serious competitor for Anna Jones (4.7K words/minute, 67% comprehension, see [2]) In my native language I read just above 1 page a minute, if the pages are not too dense I can do sometimes 2. In English I can often get close to 1 page a minute, except with books that are quite dense (think fantasy). So I guess around 300-350 wpm in Dutch, 250 wpm in English (normal pace). [1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_total_number_of_pages_in_the_%27Harry_Potter%27_series [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading#Claims_of_speed_readers -- John Bokma j3b Blog: http://johnbokma.com/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/j.j.j.bokma Freelance Perl & Python Development: http://castleamber.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
