How to Read Faster: An Honest Method That Actually Works

The reliable way to read faster is not a trick with your eyes. It is to remove what slows you down for no good reason (unfamiliar words, drifting attention, re-reading out of habit), to practise at a steady pace a little above your comfortable one, and to stop giving every text the same careful treatment. Expect a modest gain on ordinary reading and a much larger saving from choosing what deserves a close read at all.

That is less exciting than the promise on the cover of most speed-reading books, but it is what the research supports. The method below has five steps and a 15-minute daily routine.

How fast can you realistically read?

Start with honest numbers. A meta-analysis of 190 studies puts the average adult silent reading rate in English at about 238 words per minute (WPM) for non-fiction and 260 WPM for fiction, with most adults between 175 and 300 WPM on non-fiction (Brysbaert, 2019). Our guide to average reading speed breaks those figures down.

The largest review of speed reading (Rayner et al., 2016) concludes that there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy, and that readers are unlikely to double or triple their rate, for example from about 250 to 500–750 WPM, while understanding the text as well as before. The same review says what does work: practice at reading and stronger language skills, vocabulary above all. For the full argument, see does speed reading work?

Aim for the fast end of your own normal range on text you understand, and for skimming on text that does not need full attention. Anything sold as reading several times faster with full comprehension is describing skimming.

Step 1: Measure your baseline speed and comprehension

You cannot tell whether anything is working without a starting figure, and a WPM number means little unless you check understanding at the same time.

1. Choose a passage of 500 to 1,000 words that is typical of what you actually read, and note its word count. Any word processor will count it; so does Tachi when you paste a text into your library.
2. Read it once at your normal pace with a timer running. Do not try to perform.
3. Divide the word count by the minutes taken. 800 words in 3 minutes 20 seconds is 240 WPM.
4. Without looking back, write a three-to-five sentence summary and two details you remember. Then check them against the text.
5. Repeat with two more passages on different days and average the three results.

Step 2: Fix the real bottlenecks

Reading speed is limited mainly by how quickly you recognise words and build meaning, not by how fast your eyes travel. So the first gains come from the language side.

Vocabulary and background knowledge

Your eyes rest longer on rare and unexpected words than on common, predictable ones. The more often you have met a word, the faster you process it, and the more you know about a subject, the more of each sentence you can anticipate. This is why Rayner et al. (2016) describe language skill as being at the heart of reading speed, and why they recommend reading widely over re-reading the same passage.

• Read more, and across more subjects, than you do now. Volume is the main driver.
• When you start an unfamiliar field, read a short introduction first. The harder material will then go faster.
• Look up words you keep meeting and cannot define. Ten a week is plenty.

Attention

A lot of slow reading is really interrupted reading: your eyes keep moving while your mind is elsewhere, and you have to go back. Before you begin, decide what you want from the text and write it down as a question. Put the phone out of reach, read in blocks of 20 to 25 minutes, and stop at the end of each section to say in one sentence what it claimed.

Regression habits

Skilled readers move backwards in the text on about 10 to 15 percent of their eye movements. Most of these regressions are useful: in one experiment, readers who were prevented from re-reading tricky sentences answered comprehension questions at about chance level, compared with about 75 percent when they could look back (Schotter et al., 2014). The target is not zero regressions. It is fewer re-reads caused by inattention, which the attention habits above and a pacer both help with. Our explainer on eye movements in reading covers the mechanics.

The inner voice

You will be told to silence the voice in your head. Do not make that a goal: experiments that block inner speech find worse comprehension on demanding text. What you can do is stop sounding out easy material word by word, as explained in the guide to subvocalization.

Step 3: Use a pacer to hold a steady speed

A pacer is anything that moves through the text at a set tempo for your eyes to follow: a finger or pen under the line on paper, or a moving highlight on screen. Its job is to keep you from drifting and to make your speed a deliberate choice.

1. Set the pace to your measured baseline, rounded to the nearest 25 WPM.
2. Read for five minutes. If you could summarise what you read, raise the pace by 25 WPM.
3. When the summary gets thin or you start losing sentences, go back down one step. That is your working speed for this kind of text.
4. Slow down on purpose for dense passages. A fixed speed for everything is the wrong aim.

Word-at-a-time display, or RSVP reading, is the other common pacing format. In studies, comprehension with RSVP matched normal reading when the overall rate was the same and fell when the stream was sped up, so treat it as a pacing and focus tool. It suits articles and backlog reading well; the guide to speed reading a PDF shows the workflow. Formats that restyle words, such as bold word-beginnings, are a matter of taste (see RSVP vs bionic reading).

Step 4: Read in phrases, within limits

Reading phrase by phrase, known as chunking, helps on easy text because meaning arrives in units such as "at the end of the day" and not in single words. The limit is physical. During one fixation, readers of English identify words only within about seven letters to the right of where they are looking, and pick up coarser information such as word lengths out to about 14 or 15 letters. Two or three short words per glance is realistic; a whole line is not, and nothing is taken in from the lines below.

Practise by reading with the pacer set to two or three words per step at your working speed. Drills for noticing items away from your point of gaze are covered in peripheral vision training, along with what they can and cannot change.

Step 5: Know when to skim and when to slow down

The biggest time saving available to most readers is not reading faster. It is reading less of what does not matter. In a classic comparison, trained speed readers and untrained people asked to skim both moved at around 600 to 700 WPM, and neither could answer detail questions about parts of the text they had not looked at. Speed reading at those rates is skimming with a different name.

Skimming done on purpose is a real skill. For a long document:

1. Read the title, headings, and the first and last paragraphs.
2. Read the first sentence of each remaining paragraph.
3. Decide which sections answer your question and read only those at full attention.

One study found that skimming a whole text under time pressure gave better memory for its important ideas than reading just the first or second half normally (Duggan & Payne, 2009). Skim when the gist is enough or when you are deciding whether to read properly; read normally for contracts, instructions, arguments you need to evaluate and anything you will be tested on. The difference between the two search modes is explained in skimming vs scanning.

Which speed-reading techniques does the evidence support?

A 15-minute daily routine

This routine uses Tachi's drills as a short warm-up and spends most of the time where reading improves: on real text. It extends the ten-minute plan on the How Tachi works page. It is a practical suggestion, not a dose established by research.

1. Minute 0–1, warm-up. 30 seconds of the 13-Point Eye Workout, then 30 seconds of Circular Eye Motion. See eye warm-up exercises for what these do and do not do.
2. Minute 1–3, attention. Two or three 4×4 grids of the Schulte table; move to 5×5 when 4×4 feels easy.
3. Minute 3–5, recognition. Ten words on the tachistoscope at a level where you get most right, going up a level when you score 9 or 10, then one 30-second Text Scan.
4. Minute 5–13, paced reading. Eight minutes of your own text in the reader at your working speed. Raise it by 25 WPM only while you still follow nearly everything.
5. Minute 13–15, recall.Close the text and write three sentences on what you read. If you cannot, tomorrow's pace is one step lower.

Be clear about what the drills are for. People get faster at the drills themselves, but good evidence that this carries over to reading speed on ordinary text is lacking. Use them to settle your attention before the reading block, which is the part that counts. They are not a treatment for any vision problem; if you have eye strain, double vision or headaches when you read, see an optometrist.

How to track progress

Repeat the Step 1 measurement once a week, on a fresh passage of similar difficulty, and record both the WPM and whether your summary held up. Give it four weeks before judging. A realistic result is a working speed somewhat above your baseline on familiar material, steadier concentration, and a quicker decision about what to skim. If your WPM rises while your summaries get worse, you have learned to skim, which is useful, but it is not the same thing. Unfamiliar terms in this guide are defined in the glossary.