How to read faster without forgetting what you read

If you want to know how to read faster, start by deciding how well you need to know each text. Skim what you only need the gist of, preview the rest before you read it, and read more in the subjects you care about, because a bigger vocabulary and more background knowledge are what make skilled readers fast. Then check that you understood. Speed reading courses that promise two or three times your speed without losing anything don't hold up in the research.

How fast do most people read?

Most adults read non-fiction at about 238 words per minute. That's the average from a 2019 review by Marc Brysbaert that pooled 190 studies with 17,887 participants. The same review puts silent reading of fiction at about 260 words per minute and reading aloud at about 183. The often-quoted 300 words per minute is higher than what most people read at.

In a 2016 review of reading research, Keith Rayner and colleagues put skilled adult readers at about 200 to 400 words per minute. So if you read a 2,000-word article in about 8 minutes, you're right around average.

Does speed reading work?

Speed reading works if you accept understanding less. The 2016 review by Rayner, Elizabeth Schotter and colleagues looked at the claims behind speed reading courses and apps and found "a trade-off between speed and accuracy." Readers are unlikely to go from about 250 to 500 or 750 words per minute and understand the text as well as before.

Two findings from the review explain why:

• Your eyes aren't the bottleneck. Eye movements take up no more than about 10% of reading time. What limits your speed is how fast you recognize words and put them together into meaning.
• Apps that flash one word at a time in the middle of the screen take away your ability to look back at earlier words, and that generally makes comprehension worse.

The review also notes that people who claim to read extremely fast tend to do poorly when they're tested on material they don't already know. The most effective fast readers are often skilled skimmers who know the subject well enough to spot what matters.

How to read faster: what helps

Decide how well you need to know it

Not every text needs the same speed. A news update, a long product page or a report you need one number from can be skimmed. An essay you want to remember, or instructions you'll follow, needs a careful read. Choosing on purpose is the simplest way to save time, because a part you skim takes a fraction of the time a careful read does.

Preview before you read

Read the title, the headings, the first paragraph and the last one before you start. This tells you what the article is about and where the main points are, so you know which sections to read closely and which to skim. A preview also gives you a question to read for, which helps you notice the answer when you get to it.

Skim the parts you don't need

The research supports skimming when you only need the gist. Skim with a purpose: look for the sentences that answer your question, and slow down when you find them.

Read more, in the subjects you care about

The 2016 review found that "language skill is at the heart of reading speed." Reading more builds vocabulary and background knowledge, and both help you recognize words faster and predict where a sentence is going. A field you read about often is also one you can skim well, because you already know which parts are new.

Read without interruptions

Each time you switch to a message or a notification, you have to find your place and pick up the thread of the argument again. Turn notifications off for the length of an article, or save the article and read it later when you have the time.

Check that you understood

Reading speed only counts if you understood what you read. A quick way to check is to close the article when you finish and answer two or three questions about it, or write down the main points from memory. If you can't, you went too fast for this text, or you need to reread the part you missed.

This also helps you remember it later. Pulling ideas out of memory strengthens them, which is the idea behind active recall. Reading fast and forgetting most of it a week later saves less time than it seems, as the forgetting curve shows.

How to measure your reading speed

The quickest way is the reading speed test on this site. It times you on a 300-word text and asks three questions after it. To do it by hand:

1. Pick a text you haven't read, about the difficulty of what you usually read, and at least a few hundred words long.
2. Count the words, or paste the text into a word counter.
3. Time yourself reading it at your normal pace.
4. Divide the number of words by the minutes it took. 600 words in 2.5 minutes is 240 words per minute.
5. Close the text and answer a few questions about it, so you know how much you understood at that speed.

Longer texts give a more reliable number. In Brysbaert's review, results from very short passages varied a lot more than results from longer ones. Once you know your speed, the reading time calculator turns it into minutes for any word count, page count or pasted text.

Questions about reading faster

Is reading 400 words per minute fast?

Yes. It's well above the 238 words per minute average for non-fiction and at the top of the range Rayner's review gives for skilled adult readers.

Does speed reading hurt comprehension?

Yes, past a point. The 2016 review found a trade-off between speed and accuracy: reading much faster than your normal pace usually means understanding less.

How Bundle helps you read more of what you save

I made Bundle for people who save more articles than they read. You save an article from any app, and Bundle files it under a topic, so you can pick what's worth a careful read. When you finish an article, a Quick check asks you a few questions about it, and you keep the good ones as cards for later review. If you'd rather listen than read, Listen reads the article aloud while the page follows along.

Bundle is on the App Store for iPhone, and you can try it free for 14 days. There's more on keeping what you read in how to remember what you read.