Due to a variety of factors, some people just happen to be faster readers, Schotter said. And even though the eyes can only focus on a small region in their field of view, research has found that your eyes pick up important information beyond the word in focus - something that is simply not possible if you can only read one word at a time. But again, the eyes sometimes have to go back and reread words to fully grasp text. That way, your eyes are forced to focus on the word in front of you. These apps display text just one word at a time, one after another at a certain rate. In recent years, numerous apps have claimed they can crank up reading speed without putting you through any training at all. But research suggests the opposite: that eliminating this voice makes it harder for you to understand what you're reading.

Other speed-reading techniques teach readers to suppress the inner voice you hear when reading, based on the assumption that this voice slows you down. When our eyes dart back and forth, it isn't wasted motion it's actually helping us to fully understand the text. We also need to read words in order, so a zigzag pattern would likely impair reading instead of giving it a boost. The limit to reading comprehension is the ability to recognize words, so adjusting eye movements probably won't help you read faster. These methods suggest that our eyes make wasted movements when flitting back and forth over words by streamlining where we look, we can thereby accelerate our reading.īut studies find that visual acuity concentrates on a relatively small area in the field of view, making it impossible to fully perceive and read large swaths of text at once. Wood's technique trains people to read whole passages all at once, and other books and classes promote similar approaches, by scanning text in a zigzag pattern, for example. Indeed, people have been selling reading classes, books and now apps ever since Evelyn Wood introduced her Reading Dynamics program in 1959, which became so popular that Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Carter sent administration staff to take the course.

'Someone who is claiming to help people speed read is usually making money off those claims.' 'The scientific community is pretty consistent in our skepticism about speed reading,' said Schotter, who wrote a recent review paper on the topic. Speeding up this process while retaining accuracy is almost impossible, she said.

This all happens fast: a skilled reader can read about 200 to 300 words per minute. Sometimes a glitch in the process requires you to go back and reread.

Speed reading and comprehension courses