What’s Slowing Down Your Reading?
A three to five minute diagnostic. Read one short story and see where your time goes: speed, rereading, focus, or comprehension.
How it works
- You read a short story one line at a time, at your normal pace. Go back whenever you need to.
- Two sentences in it are nonsense. Press the button when you hit one. Then answer a few questions.
- You get a reading profile with your main bottleneck, then try the same length with the RSVP method.
Your main bottleneck is rereading.
Length
Quick check.
While reading, did your mind wander?
Now try the RSVP method.
A new story at the same length, one word at a time. Then the same five-question check, so the two are comparable.
This describes a reading pattern in one short session. It is not a medical or educational assessment.
Questions about slow reading
Why do I read so slowly?
There are four common reasons, and they need different fixes. Slow word recognition is the rarest in adults. More often the time goes to rereading lines, to attention drifting while the eyes keep moving, or to stopping on sentences that did not make sense. This diagnostic measures each one separately so you can see which applies to you.
What does the diagnostic measure?
Your reading speed in words per minute, comprehension on five questions, how often you went back and how much time that took, how many lines stalled you, whether you noticed two nonsense sentences, and whether you left the page. It reports effective reading speed, which is speed multiplied by comprehension.
Is rereading always bad?
No. Going back to a hard sentence is part of understanding it, and research on eye movements shows that blocking rereading can hurt comprehension. The costly kind is rereading a line you would have understood if your attention had been on it. A high reread share together with missed nonsense sentences points to that kind.
Is this a test for ADHD or dyslexia?
No. It describes how one reading session went. It cannot diagnose anything. If reading has always been hard for you, a qualified professional is the right person to ask.