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While investigating the topic of speed reading for a school project, I came across this Slate article. The general idea (which I encountered in most articles I read which discussed this topic) would be that speed reading is not a skill that can be trained and improved (significantly).

College-educated people who fret they read too slow should relax.
Nobody reads much faster than 400 words per minute.

Research on this topic is hard to come by, and most articles discussing this topic cite Ronald Carver's (1990) "The Causes of High and Low Reading Achievement" and Keith Rayner's "Eye movements and information processing during reading", both of which seem to confirm the fact that speed reading is not a skill that can be improved, due to human limitation.

By speed reading, I mean reading with a speed significantly above 400, in the range of 600–1000, while retaining reasonable comprehension (70%).

Is speed reading a skill that can be improved (significantly)?

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Mihai Rotaru
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    Is "70% comprehension" something that is well-defined amongst reading experts? Sounds vague to me, but I don't know. – Oddthinking May 26 '11 at 12:26
  • @Oddthinking: granted, 70% is rather arbitrary - people might disagree on how much exactly is "reasonable"; to avoid confusion and clearly define the terms used, I settled on ~70% - less than that would probably require re-reading. – Mihai Rotaru May 26 '11 at 12:40
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    Sorry, @Mihai. I wasn't asking whether it should be 70% versus 80%. I was wondering what "70%" meant. I see the answers are using the same metric, but I don't know what the metric means. – Oddthinking May 26 '11 at 13:36
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    @Oddthinking: fair enough; reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a writing. [ [link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_comprehension) ]. It is measured by asking a series of questions pertaining to the text. The percentage of questions correctly answered is the comprehension rate. – Mihai Rotaru May 26 '11 at 13:54
  • @Mihai, that sounds like a troublesome measure, due to the difficulty in standardising the questions asked, and the range of answers accepted. (Comparison of different readers on the same text might make sense, but between texts sound be tricky.) – Oddthinking May 26 '11 at 14:10
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    @Oddthinking: what is usually compared is the _effective_ reading speed - obtained by multiplying the raw speed with the comprehension. If one reads a 1000 words text in 1 minute with 70% comprehension rate, the _raw_ reading speed is 1000 WPM and the effective WPM is 1000 * 0.7 = 700 WPM. And the questions are not meant to be standardized - for each text, a separate set of questions is created. – Mihai Rotaru May 26 '11 at 16:30
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    If college students were studying consistently throughout the year instead of cramming for the finals, they shouldn't have to worry about their reading speed. – Raskolnikov Jun 27 '11 at 10:58
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    Sounds like a terrible measure. I would game it by NOT reading the document, and then trying to guess the answers. Even a 5% success rate at guessing on, say, 500 words read in one second would give me 1500 WPM. – Oddthinking May 14 '13 at 15:20
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    Skeptoid did a piece on this.. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4229 - links about the comparison to people who had not read the text and comprehension levels –  May 15 '13 at 12:57
  • Wonder how much of speed reading is the ability to selectively filter out, as opposed to absorb. – PoloHoleSet Jul 10 '17 at 16:58

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I personally read non-technical material at well above 400 words per minute. My comprehension will be selective, however. If you start asking questions about where the phrase "on the other hand" was first used, I'll be clueless. If you ask me when a major character first appeared and under what circumstances, I'll be in good shape.

For a few years, there was a contest called "Mind Sports Olympiad". The results from 2000 start like this:

  1. Anne Jones, 1533 WPM, 56.7% comprehension, effective WPM 869
  2. Benjamin Crowne, 937 WPM, 53.3% comprehension, effective WPM 500
  3. Andrew Havery, 545 WPM, 83.3% comprehension, effective WPM 454

So, assuming that the tests were accurate, yes, some people read "much faster" than 400 words per minute with reasonable comprehension. (I'm not sure why one would set a bar arbitrarily at 70%; presumably someone who gets 50% comprehension at 1500 words per minute could go back and get 20% more comprehension without slowing all the way down to 400 wpm.)

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find good studies on how effective speed reading training is. Obviously reading is a learned skill, so you can't speed read if you don't have training in reading. The value of speed-reading training is somewhat unclear, however. Speed reading books make a very reasonable-sounding point that subvocalizing the words slows you down, and the fastest people can speak is just shy of 600 wpm. Although this subdivides the problem—can one teach reading without vocalizing the words?—it doesn't, sadly, actually answer the question.

Laurel
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Rex Kerr
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    Reading speed & comprehension were things my school system tested for when I was in Jr. High. I remember that I tested out at 860 wpm with an 80% retention/comprehension. I feel that's reasonably accurate as memorizing drama lines, poems/short stories and/or other things for dictation have also always been easy for me. 20 years post high school, and I still remember the first 18 lines of the general prologue of the Canterbury Tales - in Middle English. – Darwy May 01 '11 at 10:08
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    That's quite impressive; did you actively try to improve your reading speed, or is it more like a natural talent ? I suspect a large number of books read also had a considerable bearing. – Mihai Rotaru May 01 '11 at 16:29
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    @Mihai Rotaru - I learned to read at a very young age; once I was already very good at reading (but still a child), my parents got speed reading books. I don't know what Darwy's story is. And it's important to remember that these are all anecdotes, and as such are somewhat unreliable and hard to interpret. (At best, they show what's possible, not what's common.) – Rex Kerr May 02 '11 at 02:59
  • @Rex Kerr - indeed, I'm aware that anecdotes are ( rightfully ) frowned upon here, but I think they still have their place, as personal accounts of the matter discussed. As such, I do take them with a grain of salt. – Mihai Rotaru May 02 '11 at 08:34
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    The Mind Sports Olympiad for speedreading was a contest with 7 participants. There's no reason to think that the people who are best at speedreading participated in it. – Christian May 04 '11 at 08:32
  • I was reading when I was 2 years old - and when taking the IOWA tests (standardized tests) in 2nd grade, my reading ability/comprehension was at the level of a sophomore in high school. I was very....bored during reading time until my peers caught up with me. I love books. I love E-Books. I can sit happily for hours with a stack of books beside me and just read my way through them. I'm living in fear that I'll fill up my Kindle with e-books and have no room for new ones. – Darwy May 04 '11 at 18:19
  • I learned speed reading. I don't do it too often, because it hurts my eyes and my head. On the other hand, I did learn to pick out keywords -- which is a useful skill of nearly just as much effective value as full speed reading. Some things that speed reading teaches, like reading 3 lines at a time, seem like bunk to me. I could just be crying sour grapes because I could never do it :) – Rei Miyasaka Jun 27 '11 at 09:28
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    When I was in 8th grade, I was in a year-long study that (apparently) was focused on speed-reading. Rather than the normal English curriculum, we were taught a bunch of speed-reading techniques, used speed-reading machines, tested on comprehension constantly, and, FWIW, also did tons of writing. Anyway, I could get "passing" comprehension (60-70+%) at 1250 WPM. I found reading that way fundamentally unpleasant and was much happier at ~600WPM with very high comprehension. A few years later, I was down more at the 400WPM mark. Upside? I read, like, EVERY SF novel in the library that year. :-) – Larry OBrien Jun 27 '11 at 20:05
  • [These guys here](http://spritzinc.com) did some research into reading speed. I do not endorse them, and it has been a while since i visited them but may be worth checking. – Mindwin Remember Monica Jul 09 '17 at 17:17