Can You Learn to Read Three Times Faster? What the Eye Actually Does

The eye does not sweep smoothly along a line. It jumps between brief fixations lasting roughly a quarter of a second, during which the text is actually taken in, and vision is largely suppressed during the jumps themselves. Only a small region around the point of fixation is sharp enough to identify letters, spanning a handful of characters, with a slightly larger region supplying information about word shapes and spaces ahead. Around ten to fifteen per cent of jumps go backwards to re-read, and that proportion rises with difficulty. Typical adult reading of ordinary prose runs somewhere around two to three hundred words per minute, and the figure varies with the material far more than most people expect.

The techniques are consistent across programmes and each has a specific problem:

• •Suppressing inner speech, which is difficult and is tied to comprehension rather than merely slowing you down
• •Widening the region taken in per fixation, which is limited by the anatomy of the retina
• •Eliminating backward glances, which are a response to difficulty rather than a bad habit
• •Using a finger or pointer to pace the eye, which does help with concentration
• •Rapid serial presentation, showing words one at a time in place, which removes eye movement entirely
• •Skimming, which works and is not reading

Studies of trained speed readers consistently find the same trade. Speed increases can be demonstrated, and comprehension falls in proportion, with the tested readers doing well on questions about material they already knew something about and poorly on detail and on unfamiliar content. A widely cited review concluded that there is no evidence for reading much faster than the normal range without losing understanding, and that the apparent successes reflect skimming combined with prior knowledge. Presenting words one at a time, which eliminates eye movement, does not raise the ceiling much, because the bottleneck is not the eyes but the language processing behind them, and removing the ability to glance back makes comprehension of anything complex worse.

Quoted reading rates differ wildly between sources and the reason is that they measure different things. Reading a novel for pleasure, skimming a report for one figure, studying a technical passage and proofreading are four distinct activities with rates differing by a factor of five or more, and a single number covering all of them is meaningless. Test conditions matter enormously, since a reader who knows they will be questioned reads differently. The definition of a word differs between counts. Comprehension thresholds are set differently or not at all, and a rate quoted without one describes nothing. Claims of extraordinary rates almost always come from tests with undemanding comprehension checks on familiar material, which is the specific condition under which skimming looks like reading.

Several things genuinely improve how much somebody gets through, and none is a technique for moving the eyes faster. Knowing the subject already is by far the largest factor, since familiar material is processed faster and understood better, which means reading widely in a field makes reading in that field quicker. Deciding in advance what you need from a text, and skimming deliberately to find it, is a legitimate skill and is what experienced readers do with most of what crosses their desk. Reading without interruption for a sustained period beats the same total time in fragments. Choosing better material removes the largest waste of all. And vocabulary makes the difference between recognising a word instantly and stopping to work it out.

Reading proceeds by jumps and brief fixations, with sharp vision covering only a handful of characters and around one jump in eight going backwards. Trained speed readers gain speed and lose comprehension in proportion, and eliminating eye movement entirely does not help much because the bottleneck is language processing. Prior knowledge and deliberate skimming are what actually work.