July 21, 2015 
mhoogland 
There is SO much out there that I want to read and so little time to read it all. It’s one of the universe’s sick jokes. I thought Ken Kalfus summarized it perfectly in the beginning of this piece for the New Yorker.
So wouldn’t it be great if we could squeeze all that reading into our schedules? If we could read a page by just glancing at it? There’s no shortage of speed reading books and websites that claim to be able to drill this skill into you. And of course there are apps that help you speed read too.
A lot of these sources relay a lot of the same information. Focus and block out all distractions. Don’t read sentences more than once. User your peripheries and track your place with a finger or pointer. Don’t vocalize the words in your head, which I am pretty sure is impossible NOT to do.
These are all good tips, but do any of these sites offer any substantial improvement? While I can’t answer that definitively, I can point you to this Slate speed reading piece about the plausibility of speed reading and information retention rates.
So what do our readers think? Any tips you’d like to share?
Take the test here to see how you stack up. I got 567 wpm (and 3/3 answers). Challenge extended.
I tried the Spritz thing a while back–at higher levels I felt like I was reading backwards and had no idea what I was doing.
Got 367 words per minute, all 3 questions. I’m “average.”
I took a six month speed reading class. Six. Months. Six. MONTHS.
(shudder)
Here’s the summary:
Have three reading speeds:
Scan
Skim
Read
Scan is looking for a particular piece of information (such as what is this about?) and going no further. Skim is reading with the goal of comprehension, skipping text that does not add to comprehension. Reading is reading all the words.
Each technique builds on the other. Once you become a good scanner, you’re skimming rate improves. Once you become a good skimmer, your reading rate likewise gets better.
Mechanically, there are a ton of things to do but it come down to physically training yourself to only move your eyes, and only move your eyes when you have processed clumps of words. Your eyes will move faster than anything else on your body.
So when I read, I don’t look at a singular word at once. I look at three to five, sometimes more.
So how do you do that? With lots of practice. Like months of it, ha, ha.
The second part of speed reading is continual vocabulary drills and comprehension tests. Not tripping on words because the meaning is unknown is the foundation to reading (obviously), but even more critical to speed reading.
Getting tested is vital to both improve your confidence and knowing what your speed limit is (ha, ha, speed limit).
I skim at 1200 words a minute with a 90% comprehension rate, which was typical of the students in the initial class. I leisure read around 700 to 800 words a minute depending on fiction/non-fiction and the prose style.
When I teach a speed reading class of just the basics, I can usually get students to improve their reading rate by 100 words. If they don’t practice, however, they’ll slip into bad habits and their rate will drop.
Thanks for weighing in. Those are some pretty impressive numbers. If only I were that quick…