History of Speed Reading: From Evelyn Wood to RSVP Apps

Speed reading as a popular idea dates from 1959, when Evelyn Wood opened her first Reading Dynamics institute in Washington, D.C. Its tools are older: the tachistoscope, a device for flashing images for fractions of a second, goes back to 1859 and was used in the Second World War to train aircraft recognition. Since then the story has followed one pattern. A new method or device arrives with large claims, researchers test it, and they find that reading faster than normal costs comprehension.

The tachistoscope era: flash training before speed reading

The tachistoscope was first described by the German physiologist A. W. Volkmann in 1859 and became a standard laboratory tool for studying perception. Its best-known practical use came during the Second World War, when the Ohio State psychologist Samuel Renshaw used brief flashes of silhouettes to train United States Navy personnel to recognise aircraft and ships at a glance. Renshaw published his laboratory work on the method in 1945.

After the war the machines moved into schools, and by the late 1950s they were being used to teach reading. The idea that you could train the eye to take in more per glance, and so read faster, passed straight into the speed-reading courses that followed. The full story of the device is in what is a tachistoscope?

Who was Evelyn Wood?

Evelyn Wood (1909–1995) was a Utah schoolteacher who taught remedial reading in the 1950s and began studying people who appeared to read very fast. According to a 1960 report in Time, her interest started when a professor at the University of Utah read her 80-page term paper once and marked it without missing a detail. By 1958, Britannica records, she was teaching students at the University of Utah a method she called Reading Dynamics.

In 1959 she opened the first Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institute, in Washington, D.C., with her husband. The business grew quickly through franchises across the United States; Wood and her husband later sold it, and it changed hands several times afterwards.

What did Reading Dynamics claim?

• Reading whole phrases at a glance. Wood said she could read very fast with good comprehension by grasping whole phrases in a single look, as the 2016 review by Rayner and colleagues summarises.
• The hand as a pacer. The key technique was to move a hand down the page in a fast zigzag and let the eyes follow it. Using a finger or pointer to guide the eyes is still taught as meta-guiding.
• Speeds in the thousands. The 1960 Time report described 2,500 words per minute as ten times the average rate and repeated anecdotes of students reading at 14,000 and 20,000 words per minute.

Those principles, the review notes, still underlie most speed-reading courses sold today.

The 1960s and 1970s: the boom and the first tests

Speed-reading courses spread quickly through the United States in the 1960s, and researchers began to measure what course graduates could actually do. The results, gathered in the 2016 review, were consistent.

• Liddle (1965) tested Wood graduates against people who had signed up but not yet taken the course. The graduates read 300 to 1,300 words per minute faster, but their comprehension of fiction dropped. On non-fiction the two groups scored about the same, 68% and 72%, yet people who had never seen the passages scored 57% from general knowledge alone.
• Carver reanalysed this work and summed up the case in a 1972 Psychology Todayarticle titled "Speed readers don't read; they skim."
• Just, Masson and Carpenter (1980) compared speed readers at 600 to 700 words per minute with normal readers and with people told to skim. The speed readers grasped the gist slightly better than the skimmers but answered detail questions no better.
• Homa (1983) tested two graduates who read a textbook at 15,000 words per minute or more. Comprehension was poor, and the study credited them with a remarkable dexterity in turning pages.

RSVP: from the laboratory to speed-reading apps

A different line of work started in the laboratory. In 1970 the psychologist Kenneth Forster showed the words of sentences one at a time at a fixed spot to study how sentence structure affects perception, a method later called rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP. Mary Potter developed it further: in work with Kroll and Harris published in 1980, readers given short paragraphs by RSVP understood them as well as readers of print when both had the same total time, but comprehension and memory suffered when the stream was sped up.

For four decades RSVP stayed a research tool. In 2014 the Boston start-up Spritz presented it as a consumer technology, showing one word at a time aligned on what it called the optimal recognition point, and promoted speeds up to 1,000 words per minute. Many apps followed. In 2015 Benedetto and colleagues tested a Spritz-style reader: readers did as well on inference questions as with normal reading, worse on literal detail, and reported more visual fatigue. How RSVP works is explained in what is RSVP reading?

The 2016 scientific review

In 2016 five reading researchers, Keith Rayner, Elizabeth Schotter, Michael Masson, Mary Potter and Rebecca Treiman, published the most thorough assessment to date in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They concluded that there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy, that readers are unlikely to double or triple their speed and understand as well, and that the way to read faster with good comprehension is to become a more skilled language user through practice and vocabulary. Eye movements, they estimated, take only about 10% of reading time, so methods that remove them save little.

Every generation of speed-reading methods, from the tachistoscope to the app, has promised to remove a bottleneck in the eyes. The tests keep finding that the real limit is the time it takes to understand language.

Speed reading timeline

PhotoReading, one of the courses from this period, has its own article: does PhotoReading work?

What the history means for how you practise today

The lesson is not that nothing helps. It is that the useful parts are modest and the spectacular parts have never held up. A practice plan built on what has survived testing:

1. Measure first. Time yourself on two pages of a typical book and write down one line per paragraph from memory. Repeat monthly with similar material.
2. Use a pacer for focus, not for miracles. Follow a finger or a paced reader for 10 minutes a day at about 25 words per minute above your measured rate, and drop back if your recall slips.
3. Skim on purpose. For material where the gist is enough, preview headings and opening sentences first and decide what to read properly.
4. Read more, and widely. The 2016 review points to practice and vocabulary as the route to faster reading that keeps comprehension. Aim for 20 to 30 minutes of ordinary reading a day.
5. Keep flash drills short. Tachistoscope practice trains quick recognition of single words. Treat 2 to 3 minutes as a warm-up, not as the main event.