The short version
You cannot read 1,000 words per minute with comprehension. Nobody can. Normal reading with full understanding caps near 300 words per minute, and the fastest competent adults reach about 550. The 1,000 wpm figure comes from flashing single words on a screen, which measures word identification, not reading.
How to read 1,000 words per minute: the honest answer
You do not. The number is not a skill you have failed to learn. It is a measurement of something that is not reading.
We sell speed reading software, so this page costs us money. Read it anyway.
Start with the baseline. An average adult reads at about 250 words per minute. Normal reading, the kind where you understand the page and can still tell someone what it said, tops out near 300. The fastest competent adults reach about 550. There is no group of people quietly reading books at four figures.
Those numbers come from a 2016 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, led by Keith Rayner. Rayner spent forty years measuring eye movements in reading. With George McConkie he invented the moving window method, the instrument that tells you how much text a reader takes in at a single stop. He had no course and no app to sell. Our speed reading guide sets out what the field can and cannot do.
Where the 1,000 wpm number comes from
It is not invented. That is what makes it dangerous.
In 2016 a group at Sapienza University of Rome, led by Marialuisa Martelli, tested the speed limits of reading. They used rapid serial visual presentation. RSVP flashes one word at a time in a fixed spot on the screen, so your eyes never move. The words come to you.
Readers hit 1,000 to 1,200 words per minute.
The number is real. Moving your eyes costs time, and RSVP removes the cost. A fixation lasts about 250 milliseconds. The flick to the next one lasts 25 to 30. Take the flicks away and words can arrive faster than your eyes could ever have fetched them.
That is the entire basis of every app promising you a thousand words a minute on the train. Now read what the researchers wrote about their own result.
The researchers said it themselves
Their words: the study does not address the full experience of reading, nor does it speak about text comprehension.
They measured word identification. They said so, in plain language. Nobody in that experiment was asked to understand a chapter.
Rayner and his co-authors are blunter. Under RSVP, comprehension invariably suffers, and it gets worse the longer the text runs. You can hold a single sentence in your head. You cannot hold a page.
There are two reasons for that, and both are things RSVP deletes.
The first is preview. While you fixate one word, your brain is already lifting information from the next. That preview is a stage of reading, not a bonus. RSVP drops one word into a box and deletes everything around it, so there is nothing to preview.
The second is going back. Between 10 and 15 per cent of a skilled reader’s eye movements run backwards over text already read. Those are not a bad habit. They are comprehension repairing itself in real time, and we cover them in reading regressions. Under RSVP the words have gone. You cannot look back, so the sentence never closes, and you finish the paragraph having seen every word and understood none of them.
So 1,000 wpm is a category error
Not a lie. Not a fraud. A different thing wearing the same units.
Ask what a reading speed is supposed to mean. It means how fast you can take words off a page and turn them into sense you keep. The 1,000 wpm figure measures how fast a word can be flashed at you and recognised. Both come out in words per minute, and that shared unit is doing all the marketing.
It is the difference between how fast you can name the notes in a piece of music and how fast you can play it.
Here is the part the apps cannot get round. Your reading rate is set by how fast your brain pulls meaning out of a word, not by how fast your eyes reach it. The eye movements are roughly a tenth of your reading time. The other nine tenths is thinking, and no app has ever touched the thinking. A long fixation is not a lazy eye. It is the eye waiting for the brain.
The eyes are small, too. The eye resolves letters across about twenty characters, and you can identify a word about seven to eight characters to the right of where you are looking. That is the word you are on plus the next one. Taking in a whole line at a glance is, in Rayner’s words, simply biologically impossible, whatever visual span training promises you.
And your inner voice is not the villain either. Most readers pronounce every word in their head, which is subvocalization. You can reduce it. Remove it and you still have a brain that needs time to understand a sentence.
What you can actually do instead
Reading is not one speed, and a good reader changes gear. Ronald Carver measured the gears.
Learning a text runs near 200 words per minute. Reading it with full understanding runs near 300. Skimming runs near 450. Scanning for one target word runs near 600, and those last two are not reading. They are hunting, and Carver never claimed otherwise.
So the high speed answer is not reading faster. It is skimming on purpose, knowing what you give up, and slowing down when the page deserves it. Rayner called skimming a reasonable way to cope with the amount of text we have to get through. It is a real skill. We draw the line in skimming vs speed reading.
The speed that does climb, climbs slowly. Speed reading courses do sometimes work, and the reason is not the drills. It is that the student read a great deal of text over eight to twelve weeks. Reading a lot is the shortcut. There is no other one, and we give the timeline in how long it takes to learn speed reading.
The 25,000 words per minute claim
That one is a lie, and you can prove it in a minute.
Open any page, start a timer, hold down the page down key and stop. The counter will award you 25,000 wpm. You have read nothing. You have turned pages. The only obstacle to a huge number is how fast you can scroll, which is exactly what the record breakers are doing.
Find your real number
Chase your optimum, not your maximum. Your optimum is the fastest you can go while still taking it in, and it is personal. The only way to find it is to measure it.
Take the speed reading test on our homepage. It times you, counts the words, and puts comprehension questions on the end, so you get both halves of the result. Then do it again in a month.
A reader who moves from 250 to 400 and understands every word has beaten a reader who claims 1,000 and remembers nothing. That is not a consolation prize. It is the whole point of reading.
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.
Carver, R. P. (1992). Reading rate: Theory, research, and practical implications. Journal of Reading, 36(2), 84–95.
Martelli, M., et al. (2016). Perceptual and Cognitive Factors Imposing Speed Limits on Reading Rate: A Study with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. PLoS ONE, 11(4): e0153786.
