How to read faster without understanding less

You can read faster, but not by as much as speed-reading courses suggest, and not without a trade. The reliable gains come from reading more often, building vocabulary in the subjects you read, removing interruptions and choosing the right speed for the text. Claims of 1,000 words a minute or more with full comprehension are not supported by research.

For a sense of scale: a large 2019 meta-analysis put the average adult's silent reading speed at about 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. If you are near that, you are normal. If you want to know where you actually sit, the reading speed test takes about three minutes.

What is the average reading speed?

The figure most often quoted used to be 250 to 300 words a minute, usually without a source. The more careful number comes from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Memory and Language, which pooled 190 studies with roughly 18,500 participants. Its estimate for adults reading silently in English was about 238 words per minute for non-fiction and about 260 for fiction.

Two things are worth noticing. First, fiction is a little faster, which matches most people's experience: narrative pulls you forward, argument makes you stop and check. Second, these are averages. Plenty of capable readers sit well below them on dense material, and that is not a defect; it is what reading something difficult looks like.

Does speed reading actually work?

Not in the way it is usually sold. The most thorough review of the subject is Rayner and colleagues' 2016 paper in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, titled "So much to read, so little time". Its conclusion, put simply, is that there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. You can move your eyes faster across a page. You cannot, on the evidence, take in the same amount at several times the speed.

Two of the usual techniques deserve a closer look.

Eliminating subvocalisation

Many courses tell you to stop "saying the words in your head". The research does not support this. That inner voice appears to be part of how skilled readers understand language, not a bad habit layered on top. Suppressing it tends to cost comprehension rather than buy speed. You can let it run quieter and quicker as you become more fluent, but trying to switch it off is fighting the machinery.

Skimming dressed as reading

Much of what is demonstrated as speed reading is skimming: taking the headings, the first lines of paragraphs and whatever jumps out. Skimming is a genuinely useful skill. It is just a different activity from reading, and it trades comprehension for speed. The honest version is to skim on purpose, knowing what you are giving up, rather than to believe you are reading at 1,200 words a minute.

How much time does reading faster actually save?

Less than it feels like it should, which is useful to know before you spend effort on it. Take a typical 300-page non-fiction book. At around 275 words a page, that is 82,500 words.

• At 238 words a minute: 82,500 ÷ 238 ≈ 347 minutes, or about 5 hours 47 minutes.
• At 300 words a minute: 82,500 ÷ 300 = 275 minutes, or 4 hours 35 minutes.
• The difference: about 1 hour 12 minutes across the whole book.

A realistic improvement of that size is worth having, but notice what it is: an hour over a week or two of reading. By contrast, finding twenty undisturbed minutes a day you are not currently using adds more reading time than any plausible speed gain. You can try your own numbers in the reading time calculator, and the longer version of this arithmetic is in How long does it take to read a book?.

What actually makes you read faster?

Nothing on this list is a trick. They are the ordinary reasons some people read more fluently than others.

1. Read more, regularly. Fluency comes from familiarity. Words and sentence shapes you have met many times cost less to process. There is no shortcut around this one, and it compounds.
2. Know the subject. You read faster in a field you understand because you are not stopping to build the background as you go. If a book feels slow, it may be that you need a simpler book on the same subject first.
3. Remove the interruptions. The largest loss in most reading sessions is not words per minute; it is the phone, the second tab, the re-reading of the paragraph you half took in while thinking about something else. A closed door does more than a technique.
4. Reduce needless re-reading. Going back to check something is fine. Going back because your attention slid off is the expensive kind. If it happens constantly, the session is too long or the text is too hard for the moment.
5. Preview before you read. Look at the contents, the headings and the conclusion first. Knowing where an argument is going lets you read it faster, because you are confirming rather than guessing.
6. Choose the format that suits you. Line length, type size and screen glare matter more than most people think. If you read on a phone, a reflowable format usually reads more comfortably than a fixed page — see PDF vs EPUB.

Should you read everything at the same speed?

No, and this is where most of the real gain hides. Good readers change speed constantly. They move quickly through the parts that are setup, example or repetition, and slow right down at the paragraph that carries the actual idea.

A practical way to think about it is three gears:

• Scan to find out whether something is worth reading at all, or to locate a particular passage.
• Read at your normal pace for anything you want to follow properly.
• Study — slower than normal, with a pen — for the few pages you intend to act on.

Most books that try to change how you live have perhaps a handful of pages that deserve the third gear. Reading the whole book in the second gear and those pages in the third is faster and more useful than reading everything at one fixed speed. We wrote more about that in How to actually use a self-help book.

How do you measure your reading speed?

Pick a passage of ordinary prose you have not read before, time yourself reading it at your normal pace, and divide the number of words by the minutes taken. Then answer a few questions about it without looking back, because speed without comprehension is not a measurement of reading.

The reading speed test does exactly that, with the comprehension check built in. Do it twice, on different days, and take the average; a single reading is affected by how tired you are and how interesting you found the passage.

Is it better to read faster or to read less?

Often the second. A good deal of the pressure to read faster comes from a pile of books that were never quite right for you. Reading them faster gets you through the pile but does not make them more useful.

A better question is usually how much you want to read in a year, and what the time actually allows. That calculation is in How many books can you read in a year?, and the reading goal planner turns it into a daily number.

There is also the option of reading something shorter that was written for you in the first place. The books on this site are deliberately short and built from how you answer twenty-one scenes at /personalise, so there is less to skim past and more of it is yours.