Can you really learn to read faster?
Only up to a point. A major review of reading research found that there is a trade-off between speed and understanding: you can skim faster, but doubling or tripling your speed without losing comprehension is very unlikely, whatever a course promises. What does make good readers quicker is plenty of reading and a bigger vocabulary, so the honest route to reading faster is reading more.
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Speed-reading has been sold for decades with the same pitch: train your eyes, stop saying words in your head, and you will get through a novel over lunch. It would be lovely if it worked. The research is less obliging.
What the research says
In 2016 a group of cognitive scientists led by Keith Rayner published a long review in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, titled So much to read, so little time. They looked at what is known about how reading works and asked whether speed-reading training could deliver. Their main conclusions, in plain words:
- Speed and understanding trade off. Going from a typical reading speed of around 250 words a minute to two or three times that is unlikely without understanding noticeably less.
- Eyes are not the bottleneck. Eye movements take up only a small share of reading time, around a tenth at most according to the authors' summary for the Association for Psychological Science. The slow part is recognising words and working out how they fit together into meaning. Training your eyes to jump further does not speed that up.
- Flashing words at you does not help much. Apps that show one word at a time in the middle of the screen remove eye movements, but the review found they tend to hurt comprehension, partly because you cannot glance back at what you just read.
- Skimming is real and useful. If you do not need full understanding, skimming gets you through a text faster with moderate comprehension. The best skimmers tend to be people who already know the subject well.
- The reliable route is language skill. Practice at reading and a larger vocabulary are what let skilled readers move quickly with good understanding.
So what actually helps
Read more. It sounds circular, but it is the finding. The more you read, the more words you recognise instantly and the better you predict where a sentence is going. Speed follows.
Read widely. Different kinds of writing build different vocabularies. Novels, journalism, essays and non-fiction all feed the same engine.
Choose your mode. For a report you need the gist of, skim deliberately: headings, first sentences of paragraphs, conclusions. For a novel you want to enjoy, there is no prize for finishing first.
Remove friction. Good light, a comfortable spot and a phone in the other room do more for your reading pace in practice than any technique, simply because you stop getting interrupted.
Why faster is not always the point
Most of the pleasure in reading a good book is in the sentences, the scenes and the time spent inside someone else's head. Racing through it is like eating a great dinner as quickly as possible. If you want to read more books, the bigger gains usually come from finding more time to read and dropping books you are not enjoying, not from reading each one faster. Our page on reading more when you're busy has practical ideas.
If you are curious about how the reading brain works, Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid (2007) is a readable introduction. Her central point is that reading is a recent cultural invention rather than something the brain was built for, so every reader's brain has to be trained to do it.
FAQ
Does stopping the voice in your head help?
Speed-reading courses often promise this. The review's broader point applies: recognising and understanding words is the slow part of reading, and no technique makes that step disappear, so be sceptical of any method promising huge gains without a cost to comprehension.
Is skimming cheating?
Not at all. It is a tool for texts where you need the outline, not every detail. Just be honest with yourself about how much you have actually taken in.
Will an e-reader make me read faster?
It might make reading more convenient, which can mean more reading overall. Whether the screen itself changes your speed is a separate question; see e-reader or paper.
Do audiobooks at higher speed count?
Many listeners speed up audiobooks a little and follow perfectly well. As with reading, there is a point where comprehension drops, and you will feel it when you reach it.
Sources
Written by the Zestasy editors. General information for curious adults, not medical, nutrition or training advice.