Average adult: 300 wpm; To put those rates in meaningful context, I applied them to the kind of serious reading regimen favored by the super-successful set. I’m sad to report that, for most of us, the words are winning. Start with newspapers and blogs. Say you read 20 articles a day, each an average 500 words long. (Newspaper stories tend to run longer, blog posts shorter.) At 300 words per minute (the average-adult speed), you’ll spend 33 minutes a day, including weekends, on that part of your regimen. But we’re just getting warmed up. Let’s look at magazines (yes, many people still read them).