Cool website Chloe! I hope to meet you one day and have been a big fan for years! Interesting thing TIm! Thanks but how to apply this with reading on computer screen? Any idea? I have the same concern with my mobile phone. I read a lot on its little screen but I feel it is not fast enough.

Do I need to train it as a habit? I already haphazardly picked up speed reading principles and do use them when comprehension load is light. Will I see a further major cognitive processing benefit by practicing? Or is the real bottleneck cognition past a certain basic proficiency? For example, when consciously using physical saccajumps I will still regress back to ponder over new things, like the sacca word. Does this go away with training? Or is cognition the bottleneck at that point?

I agree with JB. I found myself naturally doing that. If you build a two-dimensional map of the text in your head, piecing it together using alternating ends of a line lets you scan the page faster. Sounds just like the adapted version of an Evelyn Wood-style speed reading class I took as a kid in high school.

Here are some comments that fit with my experience;. I remember seeing someone speed read in high school and always lwanted to learn. I forgot about this for a long time. Really, thanks for posting this. I need to read much faster… would save me tons of time with my website and other job. Just read about this in your book the other day. Back-reading is a major issue when it comes to increasing your speed, so these are great tips.

If you read this article, you can pretty much scrap any speed-reading book out there. This is an excellent summary, written in readable English, of what countless books on the subject with regurgitate.

This is a prime example of results vs. Just things I picked up while trying to finish schoolwork faster. A lot of very specific information here; thanks for sharing. As a person who is a slow reader with excellent recall, I look forward to trying out this technique. Does anyone have any good recommendations for a book to practice this on that meets the requirements pg, lays flat, etc.

Interesting stuff. My question is can you turn it off? After conditioning the brain to read this way, can you simply gear back down and read at a normal pace? I ask because I am one of those people in the world he reads just for the pure enjoyment. But if I train my brain that fast is the new normal and then want to go back to regular speed, will it be a constant process of learning and then unlearning?

Thank you very much. Greetings from the Netherlands. I read your book, and this article reminded me this technique. I need to put this technique into practice. That kind of techniques clearly help you to increase your reading speed. Basically they are the same things I teach in my speed reading courses. I think there is at least one important thing what has not turned much attention in this post, but what is vital for achieving good comprehension at high speeds. You have to fully focus to the text you are reading.

The main reason behind poor concentration is that we let our thoughts to wander away form the text. Because of that we do not remember what we read even if we read at slow speed. Actually reading at faster pace can help you to increase your comprehension if you concnetration abilities are poor. Consider an example of driving a car. Assume that you are driving at 30mph at any empty highway. If you are driving that slow then you can shave your beard, eat hamburgers and read newspaper while driving and you will still not crash.

Now assume that you are driving at mph. Now there is no possibility to read newspaper while driving. The same principle applies to reading. If you are reading at slow pace then you can think on other things while reading. If you are speed reading then there is no possibility to think irrelevant thought. So if you force yourself to read faster then it wil help you to improve your concentration. In addition you will benefit from practicing special concentration exercises.

For example you could peform following drills:. Counting the words. Take a book and open it on any page. Count words in every paragraph. Count words only with your eyes, do not use your fingers or pencil for that purpose.

If you reach the next paragraph, start counting from zero again. Duration of the exercise is minutes. Drawing geometrical shapes. Draw a geometrical shape on the paper for example circle, square, triangle. Then draw a similar but a bit smaller shape inside the previously drawn shape. Draw it in a way that the smaller shape fits in the bigger shape, but does not touch it. Next draw another shape inside the previous one exactly as you did before. Continue until you reach the shape with minimal possible size.

Reading a boring text. Find a book or journal, which content offers you absolutely no interest. Find minutes for the exercise.

Read this text as it was the most interesting thing in the world. Avoid any distracting thoughts or making pauses whilst reading. Thanks for the great article. I have been waiting for you to blog on this subject. Now I just have to wait to see a blog on Capoeira. I guess I was too subtle. Either that, or there are lots of believers in this thread and very few skeptics. As was covered in the links from my previous post, there is a non-trivial trade off of comprehension when reading speed is increased.

Speed readers and skimmers tend to have the same level of understanding of text that is processed at the same speed, and comprehension is greatest when reading without either technique.

Facts before assertions, please. If not, limits and trade offs should be noted. However, I have seen videos of people demonstrating Photoreading on live radio, etc. Great post. There was mention of a student at USC that read 85, wpm. He was tested on a micro-fiche machine, as page turning was the limiting factor. But I can assure you it works, if you keep with the drills. I hope other people get this and get it to work. How well does this work for non-native languages?

Any research on whether this is of use in language acquisition? It is true that we can force ourselves to speed up by fewer fixations, and larger groups of words for each fixation. BUT, for good readers, this is only a minimal gain. Well, we learn to read by reading aloud to parents, at school. The habit never leaves us without special training. We read at roughly the same speed at which we speak, somewhere give or take around WPM.

Well, how fast can we think?? As your posters pointed out, there are deaf people and other rare individuals that have learned how to stop talking to themselves as they read. Their reading rates are amazing, over WPM. This amazing speed can only be achieved by a completely different approach. Please let me know if you come across any useful methods for eliminating sub vocalization. When you come across a word you do not know. You will stop and reread the words around it to understand the context it is being used.

This is another way to increase your speed when reading. Bigup for the nice summary! Ever used speedreading softwares like Acereader? In order to do that, you need to stop reading and think.

Just gave it a go. Enounce is an example of this type of software, and I use it to watch opencourseware lectures, for example. Anyway, my question for Tim and everybody: still working on an advanced notetaking system to UP the comprehension from all this reading, and now listening.

Any suggestions? Than you Tim. He spent many years assessing the mechanisms behind some of these methods and pioneered reading-speed research by tracking eye movements. In , he published a paper reviewing what the latest science can tell us about attempts to speed read. Some speed readers can finish a long book in a matter of hours, while ostensibly also comprehending the information in it too Credit: Getty Images.

These cells detect the pattern of light and dark areas on the page, and pass that information on to the brain where the pattern is recognised as words. Some speed-reading methods aim to teach people to use more of their peripheral vision to read, allowing people to take in more than one word at a time.

How about presenting individual words to the eyes at speed? So is there a way to speed up how quickly we can comprehend a word? When we read our inner voice sometimes vocalises the words in our head , and some suspect that this might slow us down. Could banishing that voice make a difference? The third bad reading habit is fixation.

Fixations are the points on the page or screen our eyes alight on as we read; we can end up inadvertently lingering on random spots, which impedes our speed. How to change it: Harry suggests using a pacer — a tool to point at sentences as you read them, which can train your eyes to keep moving. It could be your finger, a pen, even your cursor.

This has two main benefits, says Harry. You can find her on Twitter at maryhalton. Jordan Awan. TED Talk of the Day. But, Harry Potter probably has a easier repertoire of words to comprehend so my wpm would be lower on higher level books such as college textbooks. My son read super-fast between 5 and 9 years old. He read Harry Potter one book in a day and finished 7 books in a week during a school break as a first grader. That was about to wpm. He read 20 to 30 books every week for 4 or 5 years.

The fact that practice improves your reading rate, is very clear! I read a couple of hours each day and I have slowly worked my self up to adult reading rate at age There is no greater skill than having the ability to get through new information quickly, and remember it. Very true! I am 14 and an avid reader and only just found out about this wpm stuff but I can already read at wpm!

This was very helpful in college. I recently found some old school records, which included test scores. Skills can certainly be improved or enhanced with training and practice, but I think there are some abilities that people are just born with. At age fifty — nine, my reading skills help me to write better poetry because reading builds vocabulary and sparks the imagination. I am 27 years old male, I have a masters degree, and I read words per minute!

There are practical techniques that you can implement in your reading that will help you increase your reading speed with better focus and concentration so you can comprehend the material. Insightful article. Thank you for posting it. Now I have an idea of where I stand relative to average speed readers and the college level. This article is amazing, and I hope more people discover it.

Really enjoyed your text! I wonder if there is information when a sua language is concerned, which is my case. Again, great job on the articule! Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. What Is the Average Reading Speed? Share this post:. Paul Nowak Paul is the founder of Iris Reading, the largest provider of speed-reading and memory courses.

Thats an excellent tip. I have noted it down, hope this helps me pace up. I read at wpm at 12 years old so I was quite surprised when I read this. So eloquently put… Reading builds vocabulary and sparks the imagination.