What Is RSVP Reading? How It Works and When to Use It

RSVP reading means reading text that is shown to you one word, or one short group of words, at a time in the same spot on the screen. RSVP stands for rapid serial visual presentation. You set a pace in words per minute, the words arrive at that pace, and your eyes stay still instead of travelling along lines.

It is the display method behind most speed-reading apps. It is also one of the most studied ways of presenting text, so there is a clear picture of what it does well and where it falls short.

Where did RSVP come from?

RSVP began as a laboratory tool, not a reading product. The psychologist Kenneth Forster used the term in a 1970 paper in Perception & Psychophysics, in which he flashed the words of sentences one after another at a fixed position to study how sentence structure affects what people can take in. Presenting words this way gave researchers exact control over how long each word was visible, which ordinary reading does not.

The method stayed mostly in psychology departments for four decades. It reached a wide audience in the 2010s, when apps such as Spritz put it on phones and promoted it as a way to read much faster. That claim is what researchers then set out to test.

How does an RSVP reader work?

An RSVP reader does three things with your text:

1. It splits the text into words or chunks. A chunk is the group of words shown together. One word per chunk is the classic form; two to four words per chunk reads more like phrases. See chunking for how grouping words changes the task.
2. It turns your speed into a display time. At 300 words per minute each word gets 200 milliseconds (60,000 divided by 300). A three-word chunk at the same speed stays for 600 milliseconds.
3. It replaces each chunk with the next one in the same place. Good readers also stretch the display time at commas and full stops, because a sentence boundary is where your mind needs a moment to put the meaning together.

What is the optimal recognition point?

Many RSVP readers colour one letter in each word, a little left of the middle, and ask you to keep your eyes on it. Spritz named this the optimal recognition point (ORP). It is based on a real finding known as the optimal viewing position: a word is recognised slightly faster when the eye lands near its centre than when it lands at either end.

The effect is small in normal reading. For isolated words, O'Regan and Jacobs (1992) measured roughly 20 milliseconds per letter away from the best position; in running text Rayner and colleagues (2016) describe it as a matter of a few milliseconds, and people recognise words perfectly well when they look elsewhere in them. So treat the coloured letter as a convenient place to rest your eyes, not as the source of any speed gain.

Does RSVP make you read faster with the same comprehension?

At speeds close to your normal pace, RSVP comprehension can match ordinary reading. Pushed well beyond that pace, comprehension drops. That is the conclusion of the main review of the field, by Rayner, Schotter, Masson, Potter and Treiman (2016), and it applies to speed-reading methods in general: there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy.

The usual sales argument for RSVP is that eye movements waste time. They take little. A typical fixation lasts about a quarter of a second and the jump between fixations a few hundredths of a second, so Rayner and colleagues estimate that moving the eyes accounts for roughly 10% of reading time, and the mind keeps working during the jumps. The limit on reading speed is how fast you recognise words and build meaning, not how fast your eyes travel. (More on this in eye movements in reading.)

RSVP also takes away three things that normal reading gives you:

• Regressions.Skilled readers look back on roughly 10–15% of their eye movements, mostly when something did not make sense. Schotter, Tran and Rayner (2014) masked each word as soon as readers' eyes had left it, so looking back gave no information, and comprehension fell for easy and for ambiguous sentences alike. RSVP removes regressions in the same way.
• Parafoveal preview. On a page you begin processing the next word before your eyes reach it. In RSVP the next word does not exist yet.
• Control over timing. In normal reading you linger on a hard word and skip an easy one. A fixed pace gives every word the same time whether you need it or not.

One study tested a Spritz-style reader directly. Benedetto and colleagues (2015) had people read a chapter of a novel either normally or with RSVP at about average reading speed. The RSVP group did as well on questions that required inference, did worse on questions about literal detail, and reported more visual fatigue.

RSVP does not remove the limit on reading speed, because that limit is comprehension, not eye movement. What it changes is the experience: a fixed pace, one focal point, nothing else on the screen.

When is RSVP useful, and when is it not?

How do you choose a speed and chunk size?

Start from your own normal pace, not from the top of the slider. Adults reading English average about 238 words per minute for non-fiction (see average reading speed), so a first setting between 200 and 250 WPM is reasonable for most people.

1. Pick a text of at least 500 words on a familiar topic. Set one word per chunk and 225 WPM.
2. Read for five minutes. At the end of each paragraph, check that you could say in one sentence what it was about.
3. If you could every time, raise the speed by 25 WPM for the next session. If you lost the thread twice or more, drop by 50 WPM.
4. Once you are above about 300 WPM, try two or three words per chunk. The screen changes less often at the same WPM, which many readers find calmer. Go back to one word if you catch yourself seeing only part of each chunk.
5. Keep sessions to 10–15 minutes, then look away from the screen. If your eyes feel dry or tired, stop; persistent discomfort is a question for an optometrist, not for a reading app.

The right speed is the fastest one at which you still follow nearly everything, and it will differ between a news article and a textbook chapter. Expect it to settle somewhere near your normal reading speed. A setting of 600 WPM or more is skimming: useful for a preview, not for understanding.

How Tachi's RSVP reader works

Tachi includes a free RSVP reader for your own texts. You paste text or import a PDF, EPUB or plain-text file, and it is converted and kept inside your browser; there is no account. The settings map onto everything above:

• Speed from 100 to 1000 WPM in steps of 25, starting at 300.
• Chunk size from 1 to 7 words, with an optional smart mode that limits a chunk by character count so long words are not crowded.
• Punctuation pauses, on by default: a chunk ending in a comma, semicolon or colon stays 1.5 times as long, and one ending a sentence stays twice as long.
• Six display modes. Flash, Bionic, Fade and Wide show one chunk at a time. Highlight and Pacer keep the full text on screen and move a marker through it, which gives you back the surrounding sentences. They are compared in RSVP vs bionic reading.
• Pause, step back and scrub. You can stop at any point, go back a chunk or drag to any position: a manual stand-in for the regression RSVP removes.

In Flash and Fade modes with one word per chunk, the letter at the optimal recognition point is coloured; the word stays centred rather than being aligned on that letter. The full list of settings is in how Tachi works, and the terms used here are defined in the glossary.