Does speed reading work?

What limits reading speed

Skilled adults read non-fiction at about 238 words a minute (Brysbaert, 2019). The eyes aren’t what holds that number down. Each fixation lasts about a quarter of a second, and only a few letters around it are sharp enough to identify words (McConkie & Rayner, 1975; Rayner, 1998). What sets the pace is how fast the brain recognises words and builds them into meaning.

What happens at 1,000 words a minute

The big numbers come from reading without checking. Once there are questions afterwards, going faster than you can process looks like skimming: some of the gist, little of the rest (Rayner et al., 2016).

It can still feel like it works. Readers are poor judges of their own understanding (Glenberg & Epstein, 1985; Dunlosky & Lipko, 2007), so a fast page can feel understood when a quiz says otherwise.

The popular techniques, one by one

• Silencing the inner voice. Inner speech helps hold a sentence together, and understanding of hard text drops when readers are made to suppress it (Hardyck & Petrinovich, 1970; Slowiaczek & Clifton, 1980). More on subvocalization.
• Widening your peripheral vision. The useful field of view in reading is set by the limits of sharp vision, and it barely widens with practice (McConkie & Rayner, 1975; Rayner, 1998).
• Eye exercises. The eyes aren’t the bottleneck, so training them doesn’t move it.
• One word at a time in one spot (RSVP). It removes eye movements, but they were never the slow part, and it takes away looking back. Looking back is how readers repair misunderstandings, and blocking it costs understanding (Schotter et al., 2014).
• Bionic Reading (bold first letters). An online test by Readwise with more than 2,000 readers found no speed benefit (2022, not peer reviewed), and there is no published evidence for it.

What practice can improve

• Word recognition. Skilled readers get a word’s meaning straight from its spelling, and that route gets faster with practice and vocabulary (Share, 1995; Ehri, 2005).
• A steady pace. A pacer helps you stop drifting and re-reading out of habit, as long as it stays close to what you can understand (Rayner et al., 2016).
• Skimming, on purpose. Skimming is its own skill with a known trade-off: moderate understanding when deep understanding isn’t the goal. Good skimmers read until a paragraph stops paying off, then move on (Duggan & Payne, 2009).
• Keeping what you read. Recalling a text beats re-reading it for remembering it a week later (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

Limit: recognising single words faster is necessary for faster reading, but not enough on its own. How far drill practice carries over to whole pages is still an open question, which is why progress is best measured on real passages, with questions.

How to tell whether it works for you

Measure speed and understanding together. Words understood per minute is your reading speed times the share of questions you got right, so it only goes up when both hold. A gain that survives the questions is real; one that doesn’t is skimming. Take the reading speed test to find yours.

Sources

• Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
• Duggan, G. B., & Payne, S. J. (2009). Text skimming: The process and effectiveness of foraging through text under time pressure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(3), 228-242.
• Dunlosky, J., & Lipko, A. R. (2007). Metacomprehension: A brief history and how to improve its accuracy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(4), 228-232.
• Ehri, L. C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 167-188.
• Glenberg, A. M., & Epstein, W. (1985). Calibration of comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 11(4), 702-718.
• Hardyck, C. D., & Petrinovich, L. F. (1970). Subvocal speech and comprehension level as a function of the difficulty level of reading material. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 9, 647-652.
• McConkie, G. W., & Rayner, K. (1975). The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception & Psychophysics, 17(6), 578-586.
• Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 372-422.
• 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.
• Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255.
• 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.
• Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151-218.
• Slowiaczek, M. L., & Clifton, C. (1980). Subvocalization and reading for meaning. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 573-582.