“There are no shortcuts,” says Elizabeth Schotter, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, where she runs the Eye Movements and Cognition Lab. College-educated adults usually read between 200 and 400 words per minute (a comfortable listening rate is around 150 words per minute). The speediest speed readers claim as many as 30,000 words per minute, at which point research would suggest a significant loss of comprehension. It might be fine to skim through a user manual for an office printer, but don’t skim “Anna Karenina” and expect to understand it. “In this modern age, we always want to do everything faster,” says Schotter, whose lab uses high-speed video to analyze readers’ eyes as they dart across text. America’s speed-reading obsession confounds Schotter; on average, people read twice as fast as they can comfortably listen. Reading is visually and cognitively complicated; it’s OK to reread a line because it’s confusing or, better yet, to linger on a phrase so beautiful that it makes you want to close your eyes.
You tend to read faster by reading more. one of the biggest influences on your pace is what psycholinguists call the word-frequency effect; the more times you’ve encountered a word, the faster you’ll recognize it. Your eyes will fixate longer on less-familiar words, making you more likely to stall on “abode,” for example, than the more common “house.” Skilled readers start to predict words and meaning even in their blurry peripheral vision, which allows them to skip more words, especially short ones. Readers skip the word “the,” for example, around 50 percent of the time. “If you spend all your time reading ‘Harry Potter,’ you’re going to get really good at reading ‘Harry Potter,’ ” says Schotter, who suggests taking in a wide variety of texts to expand your vocabulary.
Sometimes you’ll find yourself needing to reread a word, a sentence or even a paragraph to understand its meaning. Researchers call these regressions, and faster readers generally make fewer of them than slower readers do. Some writing is harder to decode and predict and is more likely to trigger regressions. Among the hardest are what psycholinguists call garden-path sentences, like “The cotton clothes are made up of grows in Mississippi.” If speed is your aim, the clearer the prose, the faster you’ll read. “Part of the burden,” Schotter says, “is on the writer.”