Your reading vitals
4 min read
The Reader tab draws you as a reader, a small set of vitals you can watch over time. This guide explains what they mean and how each is worked out, so nothing on the tab is a black box.
Two kinds of vital
Reading self is how you think when you read: six leans, each sitting somewhere between two poles.
- Inquiry: Absorbing ↔ Questioning
- Reflection: Outward ↔ Inward
- Range: Focused ↔ Wide
- Synthesis: Siloed ↔ Woven
- Craft: Ideas ↔ Language
- Immersion: Detached ↔ Immersed
These are leans, not grades. Reading "Focused" isn't worse than "Wide," and "Absorbing" isn't worse than "Questioning". They're just different ways to read, and the dot shows where you sit.
Reading rhythm is how you show up: your Cadence (Sporadic ↔ Steady) and this month's counts: thoughts captured, active days, and sources. These are plain facts, so they show their actual numbers.
Where the vitals come from
We don't hand you a personality quiz. The six identity vitals are built on Openness to Experience, the Big Five trait most tied to curious reading and abstract thinking, whose six well-studied facets our six vitals map onto one for one. Cadence comes from a second Big Five trait, Conscientiousness.
They are inferred from what you capture, not measured by a test: a mirror for reflection, not a diagnosis.
How the numbers are worked out
Every vital is built from things we can literally count in your own record, never a vibe. A few rules hold everywhere:
- A "thought" is one entry. Everything is counted over your entries.
- "This month" means your last 30 days, a rolling window rather than a calendar reset.
- Each vital is a blend of two or three ingredients, each of which is just a rate ("2 of 3 of your thoughts open a question") or a count with a fixed scale ("thoughts across 3 books"). Tap any vital to see exactly what fed it, the raw values, and the real thoughts behind it.
- The formula never changes month to month, so the trend line is an honest comparison of you against yourself.
Almost everything is a plain count. The one exception is Reflection's "inward turn", meaning whether a thought connects the book to your own life, which is a judgment made once, when the entry is first saved, and then just counted like anything else. The thoughts it counted are shown to you as evidence.
Two of them read your whole record
Range and Synthesis describe a reading life rather than a month, so they're measured over everything you've captured: a month spent deep in one book doesn't make you a narrow reader, and it no longer says you are. Range counts the works and kinds of work in your record; Synthesis counts how many of the themes Ruxpin has drawn from your reading span more than one book.
The other five stay on the last 30 days, because they measure what your thinking is doing lately. Cadence especially, which would mean nothing averaged over years. A vital's Breakdown says which it is: a lifetime ingredient reads "in your whole record".
Why Immersion takes a while
Immersion, how much you live inside a story rather than watch it from outside, is the hardest one to read from short captured thoughts. So it needs more entries before it commits to a lean, and until then it shows as forming. It fills in as you capture more, especially about character, world, and story. If it sits "forming" longer than the others, that's by design, not a bug.
When vitals appear
A vital waits until it has enough to say something true, around five entries in the last month, and shows forming until then. Below that, the tab leads with your portrait, which is taking shape from the same thoughts. Keep capturing and the whole picture sharpens.
Sharing what the tab shows
The tab has a Share your record control that turns your counts into a card you can post or send. It is there from your first day, and the card it makes by default carries none of your writing. Sharing your record covers what is on it.
The epigraph and each vital's note
The line at the top of the tab, your epigraph, and the short "what this could mean" note inside each vital are both set from your thoughts in a dated weekly impression, unlike the numbers, which are worked out live every time the tab opens. How and when they're set has its own guide.