The short version
You cannot stop subvocalizing. You can quieten it, and the gain is smaller than the courses claim, because the voice is not what slows you. Meaning is. Read material you know, read with a purpose, and read a great deal. Most adults sit near 250 words per minute and normal reading tops out near 300.
What you are actually trying to change
Subvocalization is the voice in your head saying the words as you read.
It will not go away. Silence it and comprehension goes with it, because that voice holds long sentences together and carries every abstract word you meet. Readers who manage full silence describe the same thing. The words go past, the eyes move, and nothing lands.
So the goal is not silence. The goal is a voice you can turn down.
Find yours first. Put two fingers on your throat, below the jaw, and read a paragraph at your normal pace. Many people feel the larynx moving, shaping words that never get said. If you feel nothing, you still subvocalize. Most of it happens in the brain with no help from the throat.
A strong reader still sounds out the load-bearing words. They stop sounding out the filler. The theory sits on our page about subvocalization, and the rest of the picture is in our speed reading guide.
Why this is not the lever you were sold
Read this before you spend a fortnight on it.
In 2016 Keith Rayner led a review of the whole field in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. With George McConkie he had invented the moving window paradigm, the instrument that measures how much text a reader takes in per fixation. Forty years of measurement. No course to sell.
Reading rate is limited by how fast your brain extracts meaning, not by how fast your eyes take in text.
Hold that against the sales pitch. The pitch says the inner voice is a bottleneck at the mouth, and that removing it opens a pipe. But the pipe was never at the mouth. A long pause on a word happens because your brain hit something it could not process. An unfamiliar term. A clause that will not fit.
The voice runs on the machinery of speech, and speech is slow. That much is true. It is also not where your ceiling sits.
A reader with a silent head and a thin vocabulary stalls on every third word. They stall at the same rate as everybody else, in silence.
So quieten the voice if you like. Expect a trim, not a transformation.
What works
Three things, and none of them involve a gadget.
Read material you know
The voice narrates hardest when the going is hard. Familiar words come out of memory sooner, the pause shortens, and the narration thins to the words that carry weight.
This is why the fix runs through knowledge, not through your throat. Build vocabulary and background knowledge and the voice quietens on its own, because there is less for it to do.
Read with a purpose
Before you open a document, write down what you want from it. One question is enough. Then read to answer it.
Your eyes stop wandering. The voice stops narrating for its own sake. You are hunting rather than receiving, and attention costs nothing.
Preview the text first. The headings, the first line of each section, the conclusion. Two minutes. A brain that knows what is coming does not need to sound out every word to follow it.
Read a lot
Here is the finding the industry buries. Speed reading courses do sometimes work, and Rayner’s group say so. The gain is not produced by the techniques. It is produced by the student reading a great deal of text over eight to twelve weeks.
There is no shortcut. Reading a lot is the shortcut.
Thirty minutes a day, kept up for three months, will do more than every anti-voice drill on the market. Nobody can charge you for it, which is why it is not on the poster.
What does not work
Gum, humming and counting
The idea is to jam the speech system with a competing task so it cannot pronounce the words.
It works. That is the problem. It also jams working memory, which is the thing you read with. You end up faster and blanker, turning pages with nothing landing.
Word-flashing apps
The apps flash one word at a time in a fixed spot.
Give them this much. It does speed up word identification, because it removes the cost of moving your eyes, and that cost is real. Then it takes preview away, and it takes away your ability to go back when something does not fit. Comprehension suffers, and it suffers worse the longer the text runs. The apps fix the one part that was never the constraint and break the two parts that were. More on speed reading apps.
Widening your chunks
Every course tells you to take in five words at a stop, on the grounds that the voice cannot keep up with a chunk that wide.
You cannot take in five words at a stop. 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 taking in a whole line simply biologically impossible. See visual span in reading.
Refusing to go back
Even skilled readers send 10 to 15% of their eye movements backwards. Most of those happen because comprehension failed, so the trip back is the repair. Forbid it and you keep the fault and lose the repair. See reading regressions and eye movements.
The honest ceiling
An average adult reads about 250 words per minute. Normal reading, understood and remembered, tops out near 300. The fastest competent adults reach about 550, and by then they are giving something up.
Quietening the inner voice will not put you above that. Nothing will. Anyone selling you 1,500 words per minute is selling you skimming under another name, and skimming is a fine tool with a different job. See skimming versus speed reading.
Where to start
Measure first. Most people guess their reading speed and most people guess high. Take the speed reading test and get a number you can trust, with a comprehension score beside it.
Then pick the purpose habit and run it for a fortnight, because it is free. Read widely alongside it. Check your recall as you go, or you are measuring nothing. After each session, write three sentences on what you read. If you cannot, you went too fast.
The beginner’s route is on how to read faster. The methods and their verdicts are on speed reading techniques, and the drills are on speed reading exercises.
Stop working on your voice. Start working on what you know.
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.
