About this app

Speed reading has long been a skill peddled by supposed experts, and recently a slew of cheap apps claiming to teach the technique have put it back in the spotlight. So, let's take a look at the claims of speed reading and if it's really possible to read 1,200 words a minute.
Most of us tend to read at about 200-400 words per minute. Speed readers claim to hit around 1000-1700 words per minute. To get a better idea of whether these claims have research to back them up, I spoke with professor and eye tracking researcher Keith Rayner from the University of California, San Diego.
Let's start by taking a look at different methods of speed reading before we dig into what does and doesn't work about it.
Different Methods of Speed Reading
Before we can talk about speed reading, we need to lay down the specifics of how we tend to read and comprehend text normally. Slate breaks down what we know about reading:
When you factor out the amount of time spent thinking through complex and unfamiliar concepts—a rarity when people read for pleasure—reading is an appallingly mechanical process. You look at a word or several words. This is called a "fixation," and it takes about .25 seconds on average. You move your eye to the next word or group of words. This is called a "saccade," and it takes up to about .1 seconds on average. After this is repeated once or twice, you pause to comprehend the phrase you just looked at. That takes roughly 0.3 to 0.5 seconds on average. Add all these fixations and saccades and comprehension pauses together and you end up with about 95 percent of all college-level readers reading between 200 and 400 words per minute.
Speed readers supposedly shorten how long they fixate on a word. They tend to do this by cutting down on subvocalization. The end goal being faster than the 0.3-0.5 seconds listed above. The idea of speed reading has been around since the 1950s, but it's seeing a revival recently with many apps popping up in the last few weeks.
As you'd expect, speed reading has a few different popular methods, but most fall into a couple different systems. These methods include skimming, meta guiding, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, and others.
Skimming is to glance through text to find important parts to read. Although this is usually considered a speed reading method, you're not teaching yourself to read faster. You're just learning which parts you can skip over. As you'd expect, studies show that we don't remember that many details when we skim.
Meta guiding is one of the older techniques. It's when you use a finger (or a pointer like a pen) to guide your eyes to specific words. The point is to decrease distraction and focus on the specific words to increase your reading speed.
Another method pushes you "read" multiple lines at once by expanding your peripheral vision. Tim Ferriss has a speed reading technique that riffs on this idea and trains your focus more than anything else.
Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) is a method used by most of the recent digital speed reading systems. Single words flash on the screen so you're concentrating on a single word at a time. As you get used to the system, you speed up how fast the display shows you words. You can see an RSVP method called Spritz in action in the GIF above.
If you're curious about your own reading speed, you can find yours with this test offered by Staples.

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