Readability / Read Rate

What is it?

Read rate is how fast a person speaks scripted copy — the standard broadcast figure is roughly 150–160 words per minute for natural delivery. It's the conversion factor between a script's length and a segment's duration: count the words, divide by the read rate, and you know how long it will take to say. Readability is the broader quality — how easily the copy can be spoken — but the read rate is the number that makes timing a script possible.

Practical example

A producer needs a 30-second voice-over. At ~150 words per minute, that's about 75 words — so they write to roughly 75 words, not 60, not 100, and the VO lands on time. The whole rundown depends on this arithmetic: a fully scripted 2-minute news read is ~300 words, and that's how producers know, before anyone speaks, whether the show will hit its TRT or run heavy. It's also how back-timing works — calculating from the hard out backward requires knowing how long each remaining script takes, which the word count and read rate give. Get the read rate wrong (writing at reading speed, ~250 wpm) and every timing in the show is broken.

Key things to know (non-technical)

• The key number: ~150 words per minute for spoken delivery (versus ~250 for silent reading) — the gap is why scripts always run longer aloud than they look on the page.
• Read rate varies by person and content: fast energetic hosts run higher, gravitas and emotion run slower, complex material needs pauses — productions often calibrate per presenter.
• It's the bridge between writing and timing: word count ÷ read rate = duration — the single calculation that lets scripts be planned against clocks (rundowns, hard outs, ad slots).
• It interacts with writing for the ear: well-written spoken copy reads at a natural, predictable rate; dense page-writing slows the read and breaks the estimate.

In Tupic Live

Read rate is the quiet engine of Tupic Live's timing features: the script/prompter tool can show a live duration estimate as the creator writes (word count ÷ read rate), feed that estimate into the rundown's segment timings and TRT, and power back-timing against the hard out — turning the broadcast producer's mental arithmetic into an automatic, always-visible number.