The short version
Speed reading exercises cannot widen your eyes, so stop drilling them. The span is about seven to eight characters and no rep changes it. The drills that pay attack meaning instead. Time a repeated passage, set a purpose and recall it, skim on purpose, and log your reading volume. Twenty minutes a day, six weeks.
Before the first drill: get a number
You cannot train what you have not measured.
Take the speed reading test before you start. Write down two figures. Your words per minute, and your comprehension score. One without the other is worthless. A reader who doubles their speed and drops to 40% comprehension has not learned to read. They have learned to turn pages.
Measure again after six weeks. Same test, same time of day, same sort of material.
Most adults land near 250 words per minute. The spread sits on average reading speed.
This page is the practice half of our speed reading guide. For what each method is and whether it holds up, read speed reading techniques. If you are new, start with how to read faster.
What a drill can and cannot do
Your eye resolves letters across about 20 characters. You can identify words about seven to eight characters to the right of where you are looking. That is the word you are on, plus the next one. The limit is the optics of the retina and no drill moves it.
Keith Rayner built the moving window paradigm, the instrument that measures how much text a reader takes in per fixation. He spent forty years reading his own gauge, and he had no course to sell. His group’s verdict on taking in a whole line at one stop was flat. Simply biologically impossible.
So the old chunk widening drill, two words per fixation, then three, then four, has nothing to train. You cannot take in five words at a stop because you cannot resolve five words. If you have been running that drill, stop today. The fortnight is better spent reading a book.
Your reading rate is set by how fast your brain pulls meaning out of a word, not by how fast your eyes move. Every drill below attacks that. If a drill works on your eyes, it is not on this page.
One rule before you begin. Never drill on something you need to understand. Use material you can afford to read badly. A novel you have finished. A magazine. Old news. Save the real reading for real reading.
Drill one: timed repeated reading
The oldest drill on the list, and the one with the longest record of doing what it claims.
Read the same passage over and over until it comes out clean at a pace that sounds like speech.
The reps
Take 300 to 500 words. Read it aloud, timed. Note the seconds and note every stumble. Read it again. Then again. Four passes, or until the stumbles are gone and the pace holds.
Ten minutes, three days a week. Change the passage every week.
Why it works
It builds fluency, and fluency is the machinery underneath everything else. When the words come off the page without effort, your mind is free to think about what they mean. Slow, effortful decoding eats the capacity you need for understanding. More on that in reading fluency.
The drill makes you fluent on the words you meet. It does not hand you a new ceiling. It clears the floor.
Drill two: purpose and recall
The cheapest drill here, and the one that goes straight at the bottleneck.
The reps
Before you open anything, write one question at the top of the page. What do I want from this? Then read to answer it.
When you finish, close the page and write three sentences on what it said. Not a feeling. Three sentences with content in them. If you cannot, you read too fast, or you were not there.
Do it on everything you read for a fortnight.
Why it works
A reader with a purpose is hunting. A reader without one is receiving, and a receiving reader drifts. Attention is the free lever in reading and almost nobody pulls it.
Preview the text first. Title, every heading in order, the first line and the last. Ninety seconds. A reader who knows the shape of an argument predicts better, and better prediction means fewer stalls. The stalls are the expensive part.
Drill three: deliberate skimming
Skimming is a real skill and it is worth practising on purpose. Rayner’s group called it a reasonable way to cope with the overwhelming amount of text we have to read.
The reps
Take a long article you have not read. Give yourself four minutes.
Run down it. Take the headings, the first sentences, the numbers, the names, anything the writer set in bold. Come out with the shape of the thing.
Then make one decision and write it down. Read it properly, file it, or bin it. That decision is the drill. The speed is not.
Why it works
Most people’s reading problem is not that they read slowly. It is that they read the wrong things all the way to the end. Triage buys back more hours than any technique on the market.
Skimming costs you the detail. You accept the cost with your eyes open. The line between the two is drawn on skimming versus speed reading.
Drill four: volume, with a log
Here is the finding the exercise industry buries.
Speed reading courses do sometimes work. Students come out faster than they went in, and Rayner’s group say so. The gain is real. The explanation is not the one on the sales page. A course runs for 8 to 12 weeks and makes the student read a great deal of text. That was the active ingredient. The drills were passengers.
Reading a lot is the shortcut. There is no other shortcut.
The reps
Thirty minutes of real reading a day. Keep a log. Date, title, minutes, pages. Nothing else.
Read widely while you are at it. What slows you is meaning you do not have. An unfamiliar word stalls you and an unfamiliar idea stalls you longer. Read outside your subject. You are cutting the time your brain will need on the words you meet next year.
The log is the drill. It is dull and it is the one that works.
Pacing with a pencil
Run a pencil down the margin at a steady rate and read to keep up with it. Down the margin, not across the text, because a hand on the page hides the words you were trying to read.
Ten minutes, three days a week, if you like it.
It holds your attention, and attention is worth having. It does not widen your span, because nothing widens your span. It cannot make your brain pull meaning out of a word any faster, and that was the ceiling all along. Keep it as a metronome. Do not expect it to lift you.
It does not suit a screen. If you read on a monitor, drop it and put the time into volume. See reading on screen versus paper.
The drills that are theatre
Not everything in the catalogue earns your twenty minutes.
Chunk widening. Two words per fixation, then three, then five. There is nothing there. The word identification span is seven to eight characters and it is not trainable. The detail sits on visual span in reading.
Word flashing apps. They flash single words at a fixed point and shorten the exposure. Flashing does speed up word identification, because it removes the cost of moving your eyes. But it takes away preview, and it takes away your ability to go back. Comprehension suffers, and it suffers worse the longer the text runs. See why speed reading apps do not work.
Eye gymnastics. Figure of eight tracking. Peripheral vision widening. Saccades take about a tenth of your reading time. Perfect the eye and you have won a rounding error.
Blocking regressions with a card or a shutter. Even skilled readers regress on 10 to 15% of their eye movements, and most of those go back because comprehension failed. The flick backwards is the repair. Block the eye and you keep the fault and lose the repair. See reading regressions and eye movements.
A week of practice
Twenty minutes a day, five days a week, plus the reading.
Monday, Wednesday, Friday: repeated reading, ten minutes. Deliberate skimming, ten minutes.
Tuesday, Thursday: purpose and recall on whatever you read for real. Pencil pacing, ten minutes, if it keeps you on the page.
Every day: thirty minutes of real reading, logged.
Change gear to suit the job while you are at it. Carver measured the rates. Memorising runs near 140 words per minute, learning near 200, and normal reading with full comprehension near 300. Read a contract twice and a news story once.
Give it six weeks before you judge any of it. The early gains come fast and they fade if you stop. The honest arithmetic is in how long it takes to learn speed reading.
Then take the speed reading test again and compare both numbers, not just the fast one.
If you want the drills sequenced and marked for you, that is what our speed reading course is for. Everything above works without it.
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.
