The short version
To read faster, read a lot. That is the finding, and there is no trick under it. Most adults read about 250 words per minute. Measure yours, read widely, set a purpose before you open anything, and change gear to suit the job. That is how to speed read, and it takes weeks.
Start with a number
You cannot improve what you have not measured.
Most people have no idea how fast they read. They have a feeling, and the feeling is wrong in both directions.
So check. Take the speed reading test. It takes a few minutes and it hands you two numbers rather than one.
Why two numbers and not one
Speed on its own means nothing. Anyone can run their eyes down a page at 800 words per minute and come out the other end with an empty head. That is not reading. That is turning pages with extra steps.
The test gives you words per minute and a comprehension score. Write both down. Date them. Put them somewhere you will find them again in two months.
Then measure again once you have done the work. If the speed went up and the comprehension held, you gained something real. If comprehension fell off a cliff, you learned to skim and called it progress.
What your number means
An average adult reads about 250 words per minute. Children run near 150. Normal reading, the sort where you understand and remember, tops out around 300. The fastest competent adults reach about 550.
If you landed near 250, you are normal. Nothing is broken. You read the way you were taught at six and nobody revisited it. The spread of scores sits on average reading speed.
This page is your way in to speed reading. No jargon. No sales pitch. Just what to do first.
There is no trick
Take this on the chin now and the rest of the page is easy.
Your eyes are not the slow part. They jump, they land, they jump again. The jumps take 25 to 30 milliseconds and add up to about a tenth of your reading time. The landings take about 250 milliseconds each and eat the rest, and the landings are where your brain works.
A long landing is not a visual fault. Your eye holds because your brain hit a word it did not know or a clause it could not fit. The pause is the thinking.
Your reading rate is limited by how fast your brain extracts meaning, not by how fast your eyes take in text.
Read it twice. It is the sentence that kills eye training.
It comes from a 2016 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, led by Keith Rayner. With George McConkie he invented the moving window paradigm, the instrument that measures how much text a reader takes in per fixation. Forty years of measurement, no course and no app to sell.
So ignore the eye drills. You cannot widen what you see. Your eye resolves letters across about 20 characters, and 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. Rayner’s group called reading a whole line at a glance simply biologically impossible. More on visual span in reading.
Read a lot
Here is the good news, and it is buried in the same paper.
Speed reading courses do sometimes work. Students come out faster than they went in. The gain is real. It is not produced by the techniques. It is produced by the student reading a great deal of text, week after week, for eight to twelve weeks.
There is no shortcut. Reading a lot is the shortcut.
Nobody can charge you for that, which is why it is not on the poster. Thirty minutes a day of real reading, kept up for three months, will do more for your speed than every drill on the market stacked together.
Keep a log. Date, title, minutes. It is dull and it is the one that works.
Read widely
If the bottleneck is meaning, then what slows you is meaning you do not have.
An unfamiliar word stalls you. An unfamiliar idea stalls you longer. Give a cardiologist a magazine feature on heart disease and she goes through it fast, because she is not learning anything. She is matching the page against what she already holds. Hand her a paper on medieval land law and she crawls like the rest of us.
Vocabulary and background knowledge are reading speed. The mechanism is direct. A word you know well comes out of memory sooner, so the landing is shorter, so the page turns quicker.
So read outside your own subject. History, science, the newspaper that annoys you. You are not improving your eyes. You are cutting the time your brain will need on the words you meet next year.
Set a purpose
This is the biggest free win on the page.
Before you read anything, ask what you want from it. Write the question at the top if that helps. Then read to answer it.
A reader with a purpose is hunting. A reader without one is receiving, and a receiving reader drifts.
When you finish, close the page and write three sentences on what it said. If you cannot, you were not there. The check costs a minute and it keeps you honest.
Preview first. Ninety seconds on the title, the headings, the first and last sentences, the figures and anything set in bold. Now you know the shape of the argument before you meet it, and a reader who knows where a text is going predicts better. Better prediction means fewer stalls, and the stalls are the expensive part.
Set up the room
Put the phone in another room. Not face down on the table. Another room. Close the tabs. Shut the door.
Get light on the page. Read in blocks of twenty five minutes, then stand up. A tired reader stalls, and stalls cost more than the break.
How to speed read: change gear
A slow reader has one speed. A good reader has a gearbox.
If you take one thing from this page, take this. The mark of a good reader is not a top speed. It is the ability to change speed.
Ronald Carver measured what readers do at different jobs. Memorising a text runs near 140 words per minute. Learning it runs near 200. Reading it with full understanding runs near 300. Skimming runs near 450. Scanning for a target word runs near 600.
Read the last two rows honestly, because the industry does not. Carver’s 450 came from readers hunting for transposed words. The 600 came from searching a text for one target word. Those are hunting jobs, not reading with comprehension. Nobody in that work read at 600 words per minute and understood the page.
Normal reading, understood and remembered, sits near 300. That is the honest number and it is more use than the fantasy.
Decide before you start
The gist of a news story? Fast. An argument you plan to answer on Monday? Slow, with notes. A contract clause with money in it? Twice. A novel you love? Whatever pleases you. Nobody hands out medals for finishing a good book quickly.
Dense material with a new idea in every sentence has a natural speed and it is not a high one. Push past it and you are moving your eyes, not reading. Worse, you come away believing you know something you do not.
Skimming is triage
Skimming means going over a text fast for the gist without reading every word. It is a real skill. Rayner’s group called it a reasonable way to cope with the overwhelming amount of text we have to read.
Use it to decide what deserves a real read. Then read that properly. The two are held apart on skimming versus speed reading.
Do not fight your regressions
Even skilled readers send 10 to 15% of their eye movements backwards, over something they already looked at. Courses sell cards and shutters to stop it.
Regressions are not weak eyes. They are failed comprehension. A clause opened, another cut across it, and the sentence closed twelve words later. The eye flicks back to hold the halves together. That flick is the repair.
Block the eye and the confusion stays where it was. You keep the fault and lose the repair. Regressions fall on their own as you understand more. The full picture is in reading regressions.
What to expect, and where to go next
Doubling your speed takes weeks. The courses that produced real gains ran for eight to twelve weeks, and the reading did the work, not the method. Anyone offering you a doubled reading speed by Friday is selling you something. The arithmetic is in how long it takes to learn speed reading.
Two warnings before you go.
Most readers pronounce the words in their head. That is subvocalization, and it runs on the machinery of speech. You can quieten it. You cannot delete it, and it is not the ceiling anyway. Meaning is the ceiling. The honest version is on how to stop subvocalizing.
Apps that flash single words do speed up word identification, and the eye movements they remove were a real cost. Then they take away preview and they take away your ability to go back. Comprehension suffers, and it suffers worse the longer the text runs. The autopsy is in speed reading apps.
Your next two pages
You now have the beginner’s route. Measure. Read a lot. Read widely. Set a purpose. Change gear. Leave your eyes alone.
When you want to know what each method is and whether it survives the evidence, read speed reading techniques. That page is the reference.
When you want to practise, with drills, reps and timings you can start tonight, read speed reading exercises. That page is the gym.
If you would rather have it sequenced and marked for you, that is what our speed reading course is for. Everything above works without it.
Whichever you choose, go and take the speed reading test first, and write the number down. In six weeks it will have moved or it will not. The number will tell you the truth, whatever you believed in between.
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.
