Calculating Estimated READING Time for your Blog

Estimated reading time for this post: 2 minute 17 seconds. Read it Later?

It is nearly impossible to find a direct calculation method for determining reading time for a piece of writing. This made me mad, and made my head hurt trying to figure it out myself. So I am going to post this on the web, where I can find it again the next time I need it. (I know I had it on a Post-it® somewhere around here….) So here is how I estimate the reading time for my blog posts. This is specifically for my web articles but technically this could be used for any piece of writing.

Accepted average for words per minute that an average person reads:     200-250 wpm

Armed with this knowledge I give readers the benefit of distraction and possibly their sleepiness level. I use 200 wpm to do my calculations. If you read faster, then that is great. If not, then this is sufficiently low, as any lower and I would recommend Tim Ferriss’ PX Project for training to read faster.

So here are the numbers you will have to come up with:

• Choose an appropriate average wpm count for your reading audience. (On my work blog I use 250 because our audience is normally Graduate Engineers with Masters degrees or higher. For this example however, I will be using 200 WPM.)
• Total Word Count for the document/article/piece of writing

This blog entry has 455 words. Trust me, it does. So let’s use that as a word count. Here is your first equation.

455 tw / 200 wpm = 2.275 minutes

tw = total words
wpm = words per minute (average)

Now that’s all fine and dandy but what is .275 minutes? It’s not 28 seconds! So here is the last step to get the number into a for that makes a little more sense. Take that decimal part, .275 minutes, and multiply that by 60 because that is how many seconds are in 1 minute.

So:

0.275 minutes x 60 = 16.5 seconds

Since this is a decimal I would just round up and say 17 seconds. If you were incredible anal and thought milliseconds on the ESTIMATED reading time really mattered, you could do more. I, however, will go no further.

So here is the math equations in its entirety and the formatted solution.

(# of Total Words) / (Average WPM) = Reading time in Minutes

455 / 200 = 2.275

Take and remaining Decimal from the “Reading Time in Minutes” answer and multiply that by 60 to get your Seconds.

0.275 x 60 = 16.5

2 Minute 17 seconds to read this article. 

(Of course I include the disclaimer that this time is Estimated. ;)