What You Need To Know About Speed Reading

Speed reading gained traction, as a way to read faster, in the 1950s, and the person largely responsible for this was Evelyn Woods, and her system is still available and being taught to this day. Interestingly, however, her focus was not on speed, but on improving reading skills in general.

Since then, numerous different techniques have been devised, claiming to help you read at speeds of anywhere up to 25,000 words per minute, which is, it has to be said, a fantastic claim.

So, let’s take a look at speed reading, including the mechanics of reading, the different methods, and the problems with those methods. And, of course, we’ll cover a few tips on how to read faster.

How We Read

When we are watching something that’s moving (e.g. a race car), our eyes tend to do a steady sweep, following the item that’s moving.

However, when we are reading, our eyes move in what are called saccades, which is a fancy term for small jumps.

You can think of this difference in terms of watches – a Rolex is known for its sweep second hand, which just keeps moving without any visible jumps, while a cheaper watch has a second hand that jumps one second at a time, in a sort of staccato movement.

So, at the end of each saccade, our eyes focus on one specific point, called a fixation.

This focal point is, at eight inches from the material being read, about the size of a US quarter (which is just under one inch), and your eyes remain fixed on that point, on average, for between a fifth and a quarter of a second.

Average Reading Speed

Now we know the basic mechanics of how our eyes move and work when we read, let’s do some (simple) math:

1. In one second, our eyes make four to five fixations, so in a minute, that’s 240 – 300 fixations.
2. At seven to eight letters per fixation, that works out to be 1,680 – 2,400 letters per minute.
3. With the average word, in most texts, being five letters long, and taking into account the space after each of those words, we can then calculate our reading speed as 280 – 400 words per minute, but that latter figure is at the generous end.

For a typical novel, where the number of words on a page is around 500, then that means it takes between 75 and 107 seconds to read one page.

This obviously varies dependent on the type of material being read (e.g. a novel will typically be read a lot faster than a scientific textbook), and to a lesser degree, the medium (e.g. reading a paper book can be different to reading an electronic one), and the size of the page itself.

Limitations On Reading Speed

There are a few factors that inhibit our reading speed:

1. If the focal area is so small, it means we are physically unable to take in much more than seven to eight letters – without having to move our eyes.
2. Our eyes are quite poor lenses, which means they have to move around to acquire more details.
3. Each saccade takes time too – we have to move our eyes a little bit and then stop again.
4. And on top of that, many people have a tendency to go back and re-read words, which further slows us down.

Speed Reading Methods

It’s time now to take a look at some of the common techniques that people have come up with to try to increase our reading speed:

1. Chunking: The idea here is to take in more words on each fixation than normal, Fewer fixations means more efficient reading, and a faster reading speed.
2. Hand Pacing: Sometimes called the pointer method or meta-guiding, it’s how many of us were first taught to read, but then we threw the technique away, largely because it seemed childish. However, this is the method Evelyn Woods used, and it requires you to move your finger below the line of text you’re reading. Doing this provides focus and helps you to pace how fast your read – the faster you move your finger, the faster your eyes move, and the faster you read.
3. Hypnosis: There are hypnosis programs available that claim to allow you to retrain your brain to read faster by tapping into your subconscious mind.
4. Photoreading: This is almost like an extreme form of chunking, where you take in an entire page at once. It uses a technique that’s akin to how you need to view those “magic” 3D images, by re-focusing your eyes to look “through” the page at a point beyond it. To be fair, for this method to work effectively, they do say you should scan the material first, to get a feel for the structure and layout and headings / sub-headings, before you enter the photoreading phase.
5. Rapid Serial Visual Presentation: Known as RSVP for short, this is a relatively new online method (i.e. you cannot use it with actual books) where text is presented in the same place on the screen, meaning you don’t have to move your eyes at all. The text is usually shown one word at a time, or sometimes a small number of shorter words.
6. Reducing / Eliminating Subvocalization: Subvocalization is simply voicing the words to ourselves, in our mind (often with our lips moving too), as we read, and again, it’s something we probably did, or were taught to do, when we first learned to read. The theory is that, by eliminating this subvocalization, we can read faster because we have removed a mental activity that slows us down.
7. Scanning / Skimming: This technique suggests you scan the page looking for the important sections on which you should focus. There are those who say this is not so much a speed reading technique, however, because what you’re really learning how to do is identify key elements of the page, not actually read any faster.

The Problems With Speed Reading

All of that sounds good, but there are a few problems with many of these techniques:

1. The biggest problem is balancing reading speed and comprehension. The faster we read, the harder it is for us to understand what we have just read. This may be less important in a fiction book than a business book or college textbook, but it’s the latter where retention and comprehension are key, of course. And because it’s relatively easy to measure our reading speed but more difficult to accurately measure understanding, we often overestimate the benefits of reading more quickly. As Woody Allen joked, “I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
2. As explained above, the area you can focus on with each fixation is relatively small, and it is the construction of our eyes that determines this. While some say that you can increase your peripheral vision to take in more words at once, peripheral vision is not the same as a specific area of focus.
3. Subvocalizing has been shown to be a vital component of ensuring we comprehend what we have just read, especially when we are reading complex texts.
4. Techniques like RSVP require you to hold a lot of information in working memory if you try to read quickly, because you’re only seeing one word at a time. In order to understand an entire sentence, you need to somehow hold on to that information until you reach the end of the sentence. It’s doable, but it becomes tiring very quickly in my experience.

So How Can We Read Faster?

In spite of how it appears, it’s not all bad news.

Here are a few things can work, in the right situation:

1. When saving time is more important than comprehension (e.g. you’re scanning several books in a store to see which one might be better for you, or you need to determine whether you should read an entire article or document in detail), then scanning / skimming combined with eliminating subvocalization is fine.
2. The pointer method can help you increase the pace of your reading (within limits), and it can also help prevent (but not entirely eliminate) those backwards jumps to re-read text.
3. Pre-scanning the text before the actual reading won’t improve your reading speed, but it can increase your comprehension.
4. Be familiar with the language you’re likely to encounter. For example, if you’re reading a science book, make sure you know the terms you’ll see (e.g. common acronyms and abbreviations, specialist terms), because this will help prevent you slowing down and breaking your rhythm when coming across unfamiliar words.
5. Use intelligent, or variable, speed reading, which means you speed up through the parts that are of no interest (i.e. where comprehension is less relevant), and slow down for the bits where you need to pay more attention (i.e. where comprehension is more important).
6. Skip over “stop” words, i.e usually short words that add little, such as “the”, “an”.
7. Read – a lot. Yes, like any skill, the more we read, the better we become at it.
8. Improve your general vocabulary, which will have benefits over and above helping you read with greater speed and comprehension.

When you apply some of these techniques, you may be able to achieve reading speeds of 500 – 600 words per minute, with full comprehension, but beyond that, it seems highly probable that your understanding of what you have read will suffer.

In addition to the above, I have an article about reading efficiently and intelligently that covers tips other than speed reading.

Conclusion

So, it seems as though there is no definitive answer on speed reading – there are those who appear to have improved their reading speeds, dramatically in some cases, and those who say the constraints imposed by they way our eyes are constructed and our brains work places a relatively low upper limit on how fast we can read.

This following quote, from Wikipedia, shows the main problem – comprehension: “the World Championship Speed Reading Competition stresses reading comprehension as critical. The top contestants typically read around 1,000 to 2,000 words per minute with approximately 50% comprehension or above. The six time world champion Anne Jones is recorded for 4200wpm with previous exposure to the material and 67% comprehension. The recorded number of words the eye can see in single fixation is three words.”

A comprehension rate of 50% is not that impressive, and would be nowhere near good enough in many situations.

And remember, assuming that the statistics are accurate, we’re talking about the best in the world here.

Practically, then, it seems there are ways we can improve our reading speed and comprehension – it’s just not going to be as fast as some people make out.

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. Magic 3D Images
2. PX Project
3. RSVP App
4. Speed Reading Hypnosis Program