To read fast and without loss of comprehension is an appealing skill. Who doesn’t want to finish a book in less time? But does speed reading actually work, or is it just another myth?
Table of Contents
- What Is Speed Reading?
- What Is Your Reading Speed?
- How Fast Do Most People Read?
- What Is Your Comprehension Level?
- Can People Get Better at Speed Reading? Or Is That a Myth?
- So, Is Speed Reading a Myth?
- How to Improve Your Reading Speed
- Speed Reading Is Part Truth, Part Myth
- Maintain a Healthy Dose of Skepticism
What Is Speed Reading?
Speed reading is a combination of how fast you can read and how much of the text you can comprehend. It works by quickly recognizing and absorbing groups of words all at once, rather than identifying a single word at a time. In order to read fast and without the loss of comprehension, speed readers avoid pronouncing and “hearing” each word in their head. Instead, they skim lines to understand words more quickly than they can say them.
In 2007, six-time world champion of the Speed Reading Competition, Anne Jones, read all 199,797 words of the final Harry Potter book in just 47 minutes. To prove that she actually did it, she summarized the plot to a group of reporters. They were satisfied with the credibility of her answer, which gave evidence to the fact that Jones had read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at 4,251 words per minute.
Another speed reading expert, Howard Berg, professes to be able to read as many as 25,000 word per minute. In an appearance on Fox 13, Berg was given 5 minutes to read as much as possible of a 624-page textbook called the Fraud Casebook—A book, he admitted, that was rather unexciting. He managed to read approximately half, and was later asked how much of the material he was able to comprehend. Berg told the reporter, “It’s talking about how people take advantage of their employers. For example, there was a janitor who put false people on the payroll and paid them and kept the money.”
What Is Your Reading Speed?
Your reading speed is the rate at which you can read a written text. It is generally calculated by the number of words you can read per minute. For example, if you can read 200 words in 1 minute, your reading speed is 200 words per minute.
To test your reading speed, grab an easy fiction or non-fiction book off your bookshelf and flip to a random page. Next, start a timer on your phone for 1 minute and begin reading at your usual pace. Once your timer alarm goes off, count how many words you managed to read. That number is the rate at which you can read a text without loss of comprehension (You can find a less cumbersome method on this website).
How fast you can read a text depends on many factors, such as your experience or interest in the subject. Dr. Stanley Franklin, author of Remember Everything You Read, estimates that “250 words-per minute [is the average] reading speed of most people, including junior high and high school students.”
What about college or university students? Studies show that there is no significant difference. Research by Dr. Rosalind Streichler, professor at the University of California, shows that the 250 word-per-minute mark is an accurate estimate.
However, Streichler’s work emphasizes that reading speeds depend on type of text. For scientific or technical material, the average person typically reads it at 150 words per minute, much lower than the rate at which one could reading easy fiction or non-fiction.
However, the speed at which you read is not the only factor that contributes to speed reading.
What Is Your Comprehension Level?
When people are given the task to read a book for 20 minutes, and they are later asked about the information they just read, they say something along the lines of, “I don’t remember what I’ve just read.” The inability to retain what what you read is a common problem, and one of the biggest challenges that speed readers face.
Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of the text. To be able to accurately understand written material, speed readers need to decode what they read and make subconscious connections with existing knowledge to make sense of the information.
Those who partake in speed reading are often asked to answer a series of questions about the contents of the text. A score of 100% means full comprehension of the text, whereas a score of 0% means that none of the material was retained.
One way that speed readers improve comprehension is by building their knowledge of the words that are used in the English language. Readers who have high comprehension are able to draw conclusions about the text because they posses a strong vocabulary (Word Power Made Easy: The Complete Handbook for Building a Superior Vocabulary provides a simple, step-by-step method for increasing knowledge and mastery of the English language. It is a book worth reading, in my opinion).
Can People Get Better at Speed Reading? Or Is That a Myth?
Though there are many different techniques for speed reading, most of them involve the concept of eye fixation. An eye fixation refers to the point where your eyes take a rest during the reading process (i.e., the place on the page that you look at to absorb a group of words with your peripheral vision). Novice speed readers tend to have a low vision span and fixate their eyes at the center of every 4 or 5-word word group. Experienced speed readers have better peripheral vision and are able to understand up to 7 to 8 words to the left and right with each eye fixation stop.
Readers who make fewer eye fixations tend to have a higher reading pace than people who make more frequent fixations. And it makes sense; Every time you move your eyes onto a new word group, they need to refocus. This duration varies and can last anywhere from 50 to 600 milliseconds, depending on how much information your eyes need to process.
How to Improve Your Reading Speed
One method for improving reading speed involves the use of a pencil and ruler. Speed readers will draw a vertical line down the page every 4 to 5 words, and will use the point where the line intersects with the sentence as fixation points. They will then read the text as they usually would, but will fixate their eyes at the fixation point and absorb the words with the help of their peripheral vision.
As the speed reader gets better at reading chunks of words and making less eye stops, the line spacing is widened. This will expand the eye vision span, reduce refocusing, and increase the number of words that can be absorbed.
So, Is Speed Reading a Myth?
From what we’ve seen so far in this blog post, it appears that speed reading is not a myth. It makes sense that you can improve your reading speed if you…
- Avoid pronouncing each word,
- Enhance your vocabulary,
- And reduce the number of eye fixations.
In fact, I can testify that these strategies help you read a book quicker. Over the years, I have used them to increase my reading speed from 200 words per minute to 300 words per minute. Something that took me an hour to finish, now takes a little less time. If I continue to enhance my vocabulary and reduce my eye fixations, I am confident that I can make more improvements.
It is also possible to make modest gains with exposure. The more often you see a word, the faster and more easily you can process it. When you expose yourself to a wide variety of different material, you become familiar with a wide range of words, which will lead to faster cognitive processing and thus a faster reading speed.
No matter how much practice you get, I doubt that you will be able to read a 199,797-word Harry Potter book in 47 minutes like Anne Jones. Nor will you be capable of reading half of a 624-page book in just 5 minutes like Howard Berg. Here’s why.
Speed Reading Is Part Truth, Part Myth
Speed reading is part truth and part myth. I have no doubt that you can improve your reading speed to a certain extent. Reading speeds up to 400 words per minute without a loss in comprehension are not unreasonable. If you read at a rate over 500 words per minute, your brain will not be able to process words as quickly as your eyes are absorbing them.
A report published in the Association for Psychological Science states that there is no magic bullet that will help you read thousands of words per minute. “Examining decades’ worth of research on the science of reading, a team of psychological scientists finds little evidence to support speed reading as a shortcut to understanding and remembering large volumes of written content in a short period of time.”
A research paper title, So Much to Read, So Little Time gives further evidence to this. Their science shows that “there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. It is unlikely that readers will be able to double or triple their reading speeds (e.g., from around 250 to 500–750 words per minute) while still being able to understand the text as well as if they read at normal speed.”
Maintain a Healthy Dose of Skepticism
I urge you to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism the next time someone claims they can help you read tens of thousands of words per minute. It more likely that they are effective skimmers rather than effective readers. There are no magic shortcuts and the science simply does not support speed reading. The only thing that works is practice: Avoid pronouncing words, enhance your vocabulary, reduce eye fixations, and increase your exposure. If you keep at it, you will be able to get your word count up to 400 words per minute.
What’s most important is that you maintain comprehension. When you find yourself reading so quickly that you no longer get what’s being said, it’s time to slow down. After all, what’s a book if you don’t understand it?