Speed-Reading: Is it Fact or Myth?

Depending on your purpose for reading, speed-reading can interfere with how accurately you understand the information being read.

Let’s say it’s 7:00 pm on a Thursday night, and you have four articles to read for Foundations of Philosophy, three chapters for Christianity and Society to study, and an essay in  Foundations of Politics all due tomorrow. By 12:00 am you’ve finished your essay and are done studying, but you still have four long articles to read for class in the morning. What do you do? You might decide that speed-reading is the best solution to this problem; the faster you read, the more you learn, and the less time it will take to get through the material, right? Maybe not.

Many people believe speed-reading is a trick that enables you to read a piece of text both quickly and accurately, but it’s not that simple. Depending on your purpose for reading, speed-reading may be adequate, but if you need to learn from a piece of writing, slow and steady wins the race. [1] The act of speed-reading difficult information may get you through a block of text faster but at the cost of accuracy and understanding. Reviews of the empirical literature on reading concluded that it’s unlikely to greatly improve one’s reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning.[2]

In their article, So Much to Read, So Little Time, Keith Rayner and Elizabeth Schotter suggest that “People are capable of rapidly scanning a text to find a specific word or piece of information, or to pick up a general idea of what the text is about.”[3] But this is skimming, not reading. You can learn to skim strategically so that you spend more time looking where the more important words are likely to be, and if the words are presented in a stream, you may be able to learn which words to focus on and which to ignore. However, that does not mean that you can somehow magically read parts of a page that you don’t look at, or process all the words in a sonic sequence.

Yet, despite these refutations of speed-reading, there are ways for you to read slightly faster. The New York Times reports, “Reading is about language comprehension, not visual ability. If you want to improve your reading speed, your best bet — as old-fashioned as it sounds — is to read a wide variety of written material and to expand your vocabulary.”[4]Journalist Eleanor Cummins suggests methods like:[5]

1. Previewing a text. If you need to make it in and out of a text quickly, look for markers that can communicate the central ideas quickly. You won’t understand everything, but focusing on these markers should allow you to move more efficiently through the story when you’re reading it word for word.
2. Reading on paper. A study done by Scientific America suggest human beings are better at reading stories on pieces of paper than on laptops, phones, or e-readers. Holding a book or newspaper and reading allows for a more intuitive reading experience than scrolling.
3. Adjusting print size.Printing pages isn’t the only aesthetic choice that can increase your reading speed. Adjusting print size can help you shift into a higher gear—at least up to a point. Studies show that reading speed increases as words grow larger.
4. Expanding your vocabulary. When you know the definitions of words, you understand more of a passage, which cuts down on the amount of time needed to decode it.

Want more tips on reading faster? Check out “5 Ways to Read Faster That ACTUALLY Work from Thomas Frank of College Info Geek, linked below.

If you’d like to talk to someone on campus about how to improve your reading, contact Chris Josselyn (cjosselyn@tkc.edu) or Dr. Jennifer Tharp (jtharp@tkc.edu) on the Student Success team–or schedule office hours with one of your professors to discuss how best to do the reading for his or her class.

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1. Etchells, Pete. “Is Speed Reading a Waste of Time?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 20 July 2016, www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jul/20/is-speed-reading-a-waste-of-time.
2. 2. “Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Dec. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/sorry-you-cant-speed-read.html.
3. Rayner, Keith, and Elizabeth Schotter. “So Much to Read, So Little Time.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1529100615623267.
4. “Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Dec. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/sorry-you-cant-speed-read.html.
5. Cummins, Eleanor. “’Speed Reading’ Isn’t Real, but You Can Still Train Yourself to Read Faster.” Popular Science, Popular Science, 21 Feb. 2018, www.popsci.com/speed-reading.