Good readers are fast readers. Slow reading limits your ability to connect each part of the text to the next part. If you are working really hard just to pronounce the words on the page correctly, it’s difficult to think about what you are reading. Therefore, your ability to comprehend the passage may be slowed down, or blocked. The good news is that the more you read, the faster you become at recognizing words, and the more you can focus on understanding the text.

Reading silently

• Adults who are native speakers of English read an average of 250 to 300 words per minute (WPM) and understand 80 to 90% of what they read. 95 percent of all college-level readers read 200 to 400 words per minute.
• An English Language Learner (ELL) who reads 200 words per minute and understands 70% is considered a fluent reader.

Reading aloud

• Adults who are native speakers of English read an average of 200 words per minute (WPM) when they read aloud.
• ELLs are considered fluent when they can read aloud at a rate of 160 words per minute.

Note:

You can’t read every text at the same rate. A good reader is able to adjust their reading speed based on how easily they are understanding the material. When a text uses bigger words, or is about a topic that you’re not familiar with, you may need to slow down.

You can find out your reading speed using a website like freereadingtest.com. The website will time you as you read a text of your choosing. If you would prefer to calculate your WPM manually, click here for detailed instructions.

When people read, three types of action are involved:

• fixations (this is when you look at a word and read it)
• saccades (this is when you jump from one word to the next word)
• regressions (this is when you go back to look at a word you already looked at)

This means that while reading, your eyes do not move smoothly along a line of print, but jump around, sometimes one step forward, two steps back.

Remember, reading has three parts. We call the part where you are actually reading a word a fixation. The average fixation is about 8 letters, or 1.2 words. There are a lot of sites on the internet that suggest that you can read faster by training your eyes to read a huge number of words at one time. You should know that this is skimming - not reading. Skimming can be a helpful strategy in a crunch, but if you want to really understand your assignments for class, you'll need to actually read them. Ten is around the maximum number of letters that can be seen clearly in one fixation. For context, New York City has 11 letters - so it probably took you two fixations to read it. You cannot read half of the width of a page in one fixation.

Some people read slowly because they fixate on units smaller than a word (parts of letters, letters, syllables, word parts) and thus make several fixations per word. Do you have a smaller fixation? As you read more, and encounter the same units over and over again, your brain will start to recognize them, correct decoding will become automatic, and the size of your fixation will increase. Increase the size of your fixation by reading whenever you can. Practice jumping over small words like in and the and fixating only on meaning words.

A skilled reader makes about 90 fixations per 100 words. If you are already there, pick a different strategy to work on—your fixations are already big enough!

Yes! We make regressions, or go back to reread text, when we're not sure what it means. For example:

• When the text is complex
• When the topic changes
• When the text contains grammatical errors or ambiguities
• When it just didn’t make sense to us
• When we encounter information that clears up previously read text that was ambiguous
• To enhance our understanding beyond what could be obtained on the first pass

A skilled reader makes only around 15 regressions in every 100 fixations. If going back to reread words or sentences that have been read becomes a more frequent habit—even when it is not necessary for comprehension—it is no longer an efficient strategy. You can help yourself stop by using a prop to cover up previous lines, or using online reading software that only shows you some words at a time. However, if are rereading because you can't remember what you've read, please go to our Memory section.

You should aim to make 4 or 5 fixations per second. If you make your fixations faster, you can read more words per minute (WPM). Below are many different strategies you can try. With any of these strategies, if you have time, you can try working with the same passage three times, and see if you make any improvement.

Pick a passage of about 200 words. Read it three times, timing yourself. Can you read it a little faster each time?

Work with someone who reads faster than you - a friend, tutor, or family member. Read silently or aloud at the same time that you listen to your friend read. Or do echo reading - your friend reads a sentence, then you read it with the exact same pace and expression.

Get a physical book and an audiobook of the same book. Make sure they are the same version and audition so the text matches. Read silently or aloud at the same time that you listen to the audiobook. Make your eyes (or mouth) keep up.

When you read, it is normal to hear words in your head (subvocalization). You have an inner voice that sends faint signals to your vocal cords - even when you read silently - and a mind’s ear that lets you hear the differences between words like DEsert and deSSERT. This doesn’t limit your reading rate because there’s no real speaking involved.

But the more you activate your lips and vocal cords, the more you have to slow down. If you are used to reading everything aloud, try to just move your lips silently without speaking. Once you’ve mastered that, try to just use the voice and ear in your head without moving your mouth at all. This will allow the reading rate of your eyes to increase to a rate that is too fast for your mouth to keep up with.

Note: Don’t worry about not reading aloud if you’re struggling with memory or studying for a test. Reading information aloud to yourself improves memory of materials. The dual effect of both speaking and hearing helps encode the memory more strongly.

Everyday objects like a piece of paper or a pen can be used as reading props! These objects can help you increase your reading rate because they help with tracking, focus, and pacing.

Tracking

If you tend to skip words or lose your place, try using something like the point of a pencil (or the eraser) and slide it along the page below each word as you read it.

Focus

Also called a sentence strip reading guide, a reading strip is like a rectangle made of three stripes arranged vertically. The middle stripe is clear so you can see the text you are reading, and the bottom and top stripes cover up the text that you are not reading. For some people, their reading speed increases when they use a guide because their eyes don't get distracted by other text. It also helps with tracking because it makes it harder to accidentally skip lines.

Pacing

Use an index card, ruler, or any object that has a straight edge and can be glided over the lines of print as you read them. Place the pacer above the line of print and glide it over each line of print. Your eyes must read the line before the pacer covers it up! This will force you to make your fixations faster. If this it too hard, you can also just pace yourself using a tracking prop like the point of your pencil. Move the object a little faster than it is comfortable for your eye to move. Force your eyes to keep up with the pace.

Note: For some people this strategy really helps. For others, the added work of following the guide with their eyes, and moving the guide with their hands actually makes them read slower. If this strategy doesn’t work for you, just don’t use it!

If you are reading something on your computer like a newspaper article or digital textbook, try out spreeder.com. This is one of several websites that use Rapid Serial Visual Presentation technology to encourage you to make faster fixations. If you copy and paste a text you are reading into Spreeder, it will break the text into chunks and show them to you one at a time. You can choose the chunk size (how many words it shows you at one time) and the speed (how many words it shows you per minute). As it gets easier for you to read faster, you can increase the values further.

Watch television with captions on in English to practice reading quickly. If you are an ELL, watch something with English audio. If you are a native English-speaker, watch a film or TV series in a language you don't speak so you won’t understand unless you read the English captions.

There are many other strategies good readers use that just happen to also help you save time reading. That's because they aid in comprehension and retention (not forgetting a concept or fact). When you understand the words and ideas in a chapter the first time, write down the important concepts, and study your notes before a test, you don't have to keep reading that same chapter again and again.

Strategies like know your purpose, preview, predict, survey, and question work because they prepare your brain to read. Reading without these strategies is like trying to put together a puzzle without first looking at the box to see what the finished puzzle looks like. It's hard to know how everything fits together. If you follow these strategies, you'll have a general understanding of what you're about to read and what you should take away from it. As a result, you'll get less confused while you're reading and make fewer regressions.

Some people look up every word they don't know in a dictionary or translation app. As a result, it can take a really long time to get through readings. Learn about alternative word attack strategies that take less time.

For some people, the reason they spend so much time reading isn't that they have a slow reading rate. Instead, after they finish a reading, they go back and read it again. This takes a lot of time and also isn't as effective a way of studying or remembering as reading your own notes. Strategies like finding the main idea and taking notes will you help you stop reading the same text multiple times. You can also learn more in our memory section.

Reading too slowly or too quickly will result in the same problem—when you get to the end, you don't understand or remember what you read! The ability to read at a healthy pace is part of the foundation that other academic skills—like answering questions, writing summaries and outlines, and locating evidence for an essay you are writing—are built on. When you have found a good reading rate, you will be ready to start working on more advanced skills.