Reading 100,000 words per minute. Finishing entire books in minutes. Getting through your mountain of work emails before your coffee gets cold.
Speed reading courses have been selling these promises for over 60 years. People keep buying in, hoping to unlock some hidden superpower in their brains.
Science tells a different story.
Decades of research show speed reading sacrifices comprehension for speed.
About 40 years ago, officials from the American Speed Reading Academy contacted Donald Homa, a psychology professor at Arizona State University. They wanted him to test two of their star students who claimed to read faster than 100,000 words per minute. When tested in a lab, these supposed super-readers blazed through a college textbook in less than six minutes, then bombed the comprehension test. Homa’s conclusion?
The only skill they displayed was “remarkable dexterity in page-turning”.
Decades of research confirm what Homa found: the promises made by speed reading programs are false.
Two techniques that don’t deliver
Speed reading courses typically teach you to take in more words at once using peripheral vision and to silence your inner reading voice. Both techniques sound logical. If you could see entire sentences at a glance and eliminate the time spent “hearing” words in your head, reading speed should increase.
Your biology has other plans.
A 2016 review by cognitive scientists and linguists examined decades of reading research and found that human vision simply doesn’t work the way speed reading courses suggest. The structure of your eye limits how clearly you can see words outside your central vision, making it impossible to comprehend entire blocks of text at a glance.
Studies show that speed readers have no better peripheral vision than regular readers. You can’t train your way past this limitation. Researchers call the notion of taking in whole lines or pages at once “nonsensical”.
Silencing your inner voice presents a different problem. Yes, you can read faster when you skip this step. Sound is fundamental to language, so converting written words into phonological form in your head is necessary for full comprehension. When you silence your inner reading voice, you process text more quickly and understand less of what you read.
Research using homophones demonstrates that readers can’t simply turn off phonological processing, suggesting this mental step is fundamental to reading.
The illusion of improvement
Students in speed reading courses do test better after training. The tests are designed to produce that result.
Researchers found that speed reading programs often make their pre-tests harder than their post-tests, or they test students repeatedly on the same material. Both methods guarantee apparent improvement.
When scientists rigorously test speed reading courses, they find the same pattern every time: students do read faster, but their comprehension drops. There’s a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Read faster, remember less.
Modern apps claim to make speed reading easy by flashing words one at a time in the same spot on your screen. This method, called rapid serial visual presentation, eliminates eye movement completely.
As users crank up the text speed, their comprehension falls. Research shows that eliminating the ability to reread previous words and sentences makes overall comprehension worse.
Eye movements account for only about 10% of the time we spend reading. Removing them doesn’t create the speed boost these apps promise.
What actually works
The biggest obstacle to faster reading isn’t your vision but your ability to recognize words and process how they combine to create meaningful sentences.
The factor that most strongly determines reading speed is word-identification ability, which is tied to language-processing skills rather than eye movement control.
The one thing that can boost overall reading ability is practicing reading for comprehension. Greater exposure to writing in all its forms provides a larger vocabulary and contextual experience that helps you anticipate upcoming words and infer meaning.
This means reading more and expanding your vocabulary. No shortcuts. No 12-week miracle programs.
Reading ability improves through consistent practice over time, like becoming a skilled pianist or basketball player.
Research does show that effective skimming can work when you only need the gist of a text rather than deep understanding. The most skilled “speed readers” are actually effective skimmers who already have considerable familiarity with the topic and can pick out key points quickly.
Skimming serves a different purpose than reading. It’s useful for certain tasks, but it’s not the miracle solution speed reading courses advertise.
College-educated adults typically read between 200 and 400 words per minute, and that rate reflects the biological and cognitive limitations of how human brains process written language. Science shows there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy.
The speed reading industry has been selling the same false promises for over 60 years.
Read more. Build your vocabulary. Get comfortable with different writing styles and topics. That’s what works.
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