Mark Kislingbury, the Guinness World Record holder for 360 words per minute with 97.22 percent accuracy, discusses his techniques. He says that when writing at this rate, mistakes only count if they change the meaning of what you're saying so it's important to be clear and concise in your work.
The record was set in August 2001 during an episode of The Late Show with David Letterman. It took him just over one hour and fifty minutes to finish the sentence "I'm sorry I didn't call yesterday." He used a computer keyboard for this attempt at the record.
In addition to the world record, Kislingbury holds seven other word-per-minute records including 66 words per minute with 100 percent accuracy. He has written research papers at 130 words per minute with 97 percent accuracy.
Kislingbury says that he gets most of his words down before going to bed at night then wakes up early in the morning to go over his work from the previous day. This helps reduce the amount of error that he makes while writing at such a high rate.
Writing at a fast pace is difficult because we usually take more than one step to come up with our ideas so they need time to settle in our minds before we can write them down.
Howard Stephen Berg of the United States claims to be the Guinness World Record holder for rapid reading with a pace of 25,000 words per minute, and Maria Teresa Calderon of the Philippines claims to be the World's Fastest Reader with a reading speed of 80,000 words per minute. Both women broke their own records while reading from phonetic alphabet charts.
The actual average reading speed of humans is 250-300 words per minute, but many people think they can do much faster than that. In fact, according to research conducted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the real maximum reading speed is about 375 wpm without using phonics (how words are spelled based on how they sound). Using phonics makes reading faster because you can guess what word will come next instead of having to wait until it appears in writing.
The most popular method for reading fast is called "phonics". With this method, readers look up the sound of each letter in a word, so they can write down its spelling immediately after hearing it. This is how experts read quickly - they sound out the letters as they see them. It takes more time to read non-phonetically, so professional readers usually don't read that way unless they have no other choice.
Reading speed isn't the only record that has been claimed.
Kursheed Hussain broke the world record for typing the alphabet with spaces between each letter in 3.43 seconds. Surprisingly, some others claim to be quicker than him on his official Guinness Book of World Records website. A Canadian man named Jeff Buckalew claims to have beaten Kursheed's record by almost half a second when he typed the alphabet at 1.95 seconds.
Here is how they did it: Kursheed typed the letters of the English alphabet one by one while standing up. He was timed from the moment he pressed the first key to the moment he hit "E".
The record was set in August 2001 at the National Association of Software Developers (NASD) conference in Boston, Massachusetts. At that time, Kursheed was working as an independent software consultant and was not affiliated with any computer company. However, since then, he has worked with Microsoft Research and currently works at Google as a senior researcher. His new record would have been enough to make him a celebrity in Pakistan, where most people don't use computers; instead, they try to type as quickly as they can so they can get their work done or go to sleep.
In 2005, a Pakistani-American woman named Zainab Ahmad became famous after breaking Kursheed's record.
Listening and speaking The ideal word rate for audiobooks is 150–160 words per minute, which is the range at which individuals can easily hear and vocalize words. For a period, Guinness World Records recognized John Moschitta, Jr. as the world's quickest speaker, capable of speaking at 586 words per minute.
The human voice has two ways of producing sound: speaking and singing. When we speak, the sounds that come out of our mouth are called phonemes. The human voice consists of three layers of tissue: the skin, the muscle, and the bone. When we speak or sing, these tissues move to make different kinds of sounds.
When we speak quickly, the muscles in our face contract rapidly, causing them to snap shut like a trapdoor. This produces a high-pitched tone that some people describe as "screaming" or "shouting." Speaking very slowly does not produce this effect because the muscles do not have time to snap shut. Instead, they vibrate, making low-pitched noises that come out more like a whisper.
People who speak quickly may seem like they are talking all the time, but this is only true if you are listening to them. You can only understand about one fifth of what people say to you because the other parts are lost in noise.
Words per minute: 212.5 (Adam Wyner).
Keys per second: 54,000 (1946 computer).
Lines of text: 479.9 (1864 electric typewriter).
Pages per hour: 50 (Morse code).
The record for most words in an hour is held by William Stearns Davis at 75,030. He was typing a book report for his children.
He covered forty-five years of type-writing history in that hour. Starting in 1946 with Adam Wyner's paper tape machine, every single word he wrote was new.
Davis died at the age of 102 in 2014. He is still the world record holder for longest continuous writing session without a break.
His handwriting was so elegant that one can only imagine how fast he typed.
There are those who have claimed to exceed the wpm record, but none of them can say they've written more than one page per hour.
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