Speed Reading: What Works and What Is a Myth

Courses and apps promise that you can read a book in an hour and remember everything. The idea is appealing: there is always too much to read and too little time. But reading is a well-studied process, and research gives a fairly clear picture of what is possible. In 2016 five well-known reading scientists, with Keith Rayner as first author, published a large review of exactly this question. Its main conclusion is simple: there is a trade-off between speed and comprehension, and no technique gets around it.

How reading really works

When you read, your eyes do not glide smoothly along the line. They make short jumps, called saccades, and between them stop for brief fixations, usually around a quarter of a second. Almost all useful information is taken in during fixations. Every so often the eyes also jump back, to re-read a word or check a phrase. These regressions are not a bad habit; they help you understand.

The area you can see clearly during a fixation is small. You recognise letters well only a few characters to the left of the point you are looking at and a bit over a dozen characters to the right. Everything further away is blurred. That is why the idea of taking in a whole line, let alone a whole page, "at a glance" does not hold up.

For skilled adult readers, a typical speed for ordinary text is roughly 200 to 400 words per minute. The exact figure depends on the person, the text and the purpose of reading.

Popular claims that do not hold up

"You can read 1,000+ words per minute with full comprehension." There is no good evidence for this. When people read much faster than usual, they are effectively skimming: they get the general idea and miss details. Skimming is a useful skill, but it is not the same as reading.

"Inner speech slows you down, so suppress it." Most people hear a quiet inner voice when they read. Research suggests it supports comprehension, especially of complex text, by helping to hold words in memory. Attempts to suppress it make understanding worse rather than reading better.

"Apps that flash words one at a time make you faster." Showing one word at a time in the centre of the screen removes eye movements. But it also removes the chance to look back. A study by Elizabeth Schotter and colleagues showed that when re-reading was made impossible, comprehension of sentences that required it dropped. On longer text, such apps tend to feel fast but leave less behind.

"Train your eyes and you will read faster." Eye movements are rarely the bottleneck. The limit is how quickly the brain can recognise words and connect them into meaning.

What actually helps

The good news is that some things do make reading faster and more effective.

• Vocabulary and background knowledge. This is the strongest lever. Familiar words are recognised faster, and knowledge of the topic makes it easier to predict and connect ideas. The more you read in a field, the faster you read in it.
• Matching speed to purpose. Slow down for a contract or a textbook chapter. Skim a news digest. Deciding in advance why you are reading saves more time than any technique.
• Smart skimming. Look at headings, the first sentences of paragraphs, figures and conclusions first. Then decide which parts deserve careful reading.
• Fewer interruptions. Every time you are pulled away, you lose the thread and have to rebuild it. A quiet half hour is worth more than a scattered hour.
• Reading regularly. Fluency grows with practice, slowly but reliably.

You can check any speed-reading promise yourself. Take a text you have not seen before, time how long it takes to read, and then, without looking, write down the main points or answer a few questions about it. Repeat with a new text after trying the technique. If your speed went up but your summary got thinner, you were not reading faster; you were skimming. A common mistake is to measure only the stopwatch and never the result.

What to try

In Fokusnyk, the Reading with distractions exercise is not about speed. It trains something more useful: holding the line of text and its meaning while other things compete for your attention. Read at a comfortable pace, notice when your focus slips, and return to the sentence where you left off. Improvements will show first in the exercise itself; whether they carry over to your everyday reading is something to watch for yourself.

Sources

• Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So much to read, so little time: How do we read, and can speed reading help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1), 4–34. doi:10.1177/1529100615623267
• Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 372–422.
• Schotter, E. R., Tran, R., & Rayner, K. (2014). Don't believe what you read (only once): Comprehension is supported by regressions during reading. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1218–1226.