Before you can learn effective speed reading, you should already be an able reader and have the capacity to absorb information fairly well. You won’t get the full benefits of speed reading if you have problems understanding words. In fact, it may be detrimental to try to rush through material that you can’t comprehend. If you can understand college-level reading material then you’re a good candidate for learning speed reading.

Now let’s take a more detailed look at who can benefit from developing speed reading skills:
• Students at high school or college often have long reading lists and must undertake research for class papers and projects. Being able to read quickly will come in handy for co-ordinating these activities efficiently and for boosting their fundamental knowledge of subjects. Students of history, law or literature are most likely to benefit due to the enormous amount of required reading they must get through. Application of speed reading techniques will also improve students’ retention of information, contributing greatly to exam revision and performance.
• Teachers and professors can benefit by applying speed reading techniques to get through all their academic literature and prepare for classes more thoroughly. The time it takes to mark essays and homework can also be reduced dramatically, freeing up time for other activities and interests.
• Employees and business people are often inundated with information from every direction which they’re expected to read and digest quickly. Speed reading allows them to keep on top of all the new reports, letters, faxes, emails, memos that come their way, leaving more time for their actual work to be done. It’s also a skill that can be acquired within a few weeks of learning, without affecting an employee’s current workload. The result is that productivity improves considerably, giving speed readers a big boost to their career or business.
• People who enjoy reading for pleasure and for their personal development stand to gain a great deal from learning speed reading. It allows them to indulge in their hobby and enrich their knowledge without sacrificing time that could be spent with family or on other important activities.
• Dyslexics have the capacity to be excellent speed readers. People with dyslexia are predominately right-brained, so they’re naturally predisposed towards speed reading which is processed in the right side of the brain. Standard word-for-word reading usually takes place in the left side of the brain, hence the problems people with dyslexia usually experience when reading normally. Learning speed reading provides them with the alternative approach they need to focus on the material and improve the quality of their reading.

In conclusion, developing the ability to speed read is advantageous for all sorts of people who have to read often and handle large quantities of information. It’s always good to acquire speed reading as a skill early on, but it’s important to ensure you have adequate comprehension and vocabulary skills before embarking on any major learning program.

The benefits of learning to speed read can be felt most strongly in professions where a significant proportion of working time is spent on reading and working with huge volumes of information. The following is a list of careers where learning to apply speed reading techniques would be particularly beneficial:

• Managers and executives – They face a lot of demands and are usually pressed for time. Speed reading can help by dramatically reducing the time it takes to gather vital information for decision-making and process required reading such as emails and reports. This leaves more time to think and perform the strategic part of the job. By broadening and deepening their knowledge through speed reading, managers and executives will also be able to communicate more effectively with their staff and key clients.
• Teachers/professors – Speed reading can assist teachers and professors by cutting down the time it takes them to get through academic literature and prepare for their classes. Grading essays and homework can be done faster and general time management can be improved.
• Lawyers – When preparing for a case, lawyers will sift through massive amounts of background information and legislative text. Speed reading gives them the ability to quickly extract the details which can help them in their arguments and reinforce the advice they give to clients.
• Administrative staff – General office workers are subject to heavy paper work and frequently have to gather research material for management. Speed reading enables them to manage these activities efficiently, increasing their productivity all-round.
• Doctors – Medical literature can be particularly dense. Speed reading can help doctors expand their knowledge and keep up with new medical developments without interfering with valuable patient time.
• Engineers and technicians – In the ever changing world of technology and engineering, workers are subject to a great deal of technical reading, including operation and maintenance manuals, product descriptions etc. Speed reading can provide them with the tools and techniques to get through this information rapidly with good comprehension so that important details are retained.
• Researchers – They have to plough through huge volumes of material to extract data that’s useful for the purpose of their research studies. Speed reading can help them do this more productively and timely so that they always meet their deadlines.
• Writers/journalists – Anyone looking to write a book or put together informed articles must perform thorough research first. Speed reading enables writers and journalists to work through greater quantities of information so they can dig out the important details for their readers.
• Media relations and PR staff – They have to deal with a deluge of correspondence on a daily basis. Knowledge of speed reading techniques would allow them to spend less time reading through letters and emails and more time replying or acting upon the information received.
• Entrepreneurs – Anyone running a business has a huge amount of paperwork to wade through. They must also be able to collate information that will help them stay abreast of what’s going on in the market and spot new business opportunities. Speed reading would assist with this and free up more time which could be spent on relationship building activities with clients or taking on more work to maximize income.

As we’ve seen, learning speed reading can be hugely beneficial in many careers where a copious amount of reading is expected. Workers who can speed read are able to complete their tasks much faster and utilise their knowledge effectively. In short, they can operate on a whole new level of productivity in the workplace and stand out against their peers.

It’s important to have an approach to time management that works and helps you strike a healthy balance between your work and personal activities. There are actually a number of skills and techniques that can help you be more effective and save time, even when you’re under intense pressure. I’ve picked out three of the most powerful and practical ones to help you get more value out of your days and improve the quality of your life – goal setting, prioritizing and speed reading.

Goal Setting
Constructive goal setting is one of the most important strategies for improving your time management. Instead of aimlessly trying to fit everything in, setting clearly defined goals enables you to see the ‘big picture’ and co-ordinate all areas of your life from a high-level perspective. Your main outcomes provide the essential framework for determining exactly what needs to be done and in what order. An effective way to go about goal setting is to lay out your long, medium and short-term goals for each different area or domain of your life, for example, career, health, relationships, finances etc. Without having your goals clearly laid out, it’s very easy to squander your time on conflicting priorities or drift about at the mercy of where the tide takes you. Once you’ve defined your goals, you can then break them down into small-scale, manageable targets and actions.

Prioritizing
Writing down a list of all the tasks you need to undertake during the day or week acts as an excellent reminder system to keep you organised. To make this list effective however, it’s vital to sort the tasks in order of priority and then devote most of your time to the important tasks. Pareto’s principle states that 80% of your accomplishments come from 20% of your efforts. By prioritising, you focus your mind on the tasks that bring the greatest rewards and avert the natural tendency to just get on with the simple, easy tasks. There are a number of ways you can prioritise. One of the most popular techniques is to group tasks according to ABC criteria:
• A – Tasks that are critical to your goals and simply must be done first (i.e. urgent and important).
• B – These tasks are less urgent but are still important tasks that you should start right after you are done with the As. (i.e. important but not urgent).
• C – These are the ‘nice to do’ things that you could do if you have any time left after A and B tasks (i.e. neither urgent nor important).
Once this has been done you can then restructure your list in priority order and work through it accordingly.

Speed Reading
Speed reading is often overlooked as a time management technique. Yet with masses of reading material urgently demanding our attention every day, it’s the only way we can save reading time and prevent ourselves getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information facing us in reports, emails, documents, books and so on. Speed reading isn’t just about being able to read quickly, it’s also about inducing better concentration so that you can absorb more information. This serves to make you more efficient and effective all round. Here are some important tips for successful speed reading:
• Chunk groups of words together and read them simultaneously, say 4-5 words at a time. This allows you to discard your old style of reading word-for-word which can hold you back. What’s more, meaning is easier to pull from groups of words rather than individual words so by practicing this skill you train your brain to understand material better.
• Re-reading of previous sentences is a habit that drastically slows down reading speed. Learn how to reduce it by running a pointer such as your finger or a pen along the line as you read. Your eyes will follow the tip of your pointer, smoothing the flow of your reading so that you can go at a speedy pace.
• Avoid sub-vocalization (pronouncing each word in your head as you read it). This habit obstructs the power of your brain to swiftly comprehend and sort out information as you read. Your brain can actually grasp words more rapidly than you can read. So, push yourself to read at a faster rate and with practice you’ll get better at processing information quickly.

Time is a vital resource and must be managed wisely if you’re to stay focused and avoid unnecessary distractions. Learn how to apply powerful goal setting, prioritization and speed reading to make effective use of your time and take control of your life.

Sounds fascinating, doesn’t it? Indeed vast numbers of people have been drawn in by promises that they’ll be able to read and comprehend a book in 5 minutes. But don’t be fooled – the apparent ‘success’ of PhotoReading is driven less by fact than by expert marketing. In reality, this technique does not live up to all the hype.

Being able to flip through and ‘photograph’ a book at a page per second seems impressive, and indeed you may become more efficient at getting through material. But are you really absorbing the meaning at 25,000 words a minute? There is little hard evidence to suggest so. For this reason there is a great deal of skepticism surrounding the system. It’s referred to as ‘pseudoscience’ with no existing research or systematic studies to fully back it up. All the scientific talk about brainwaves and how it operates in relation to the human brain’s cerebral hemispheres is just that – talk. Most of the available information on PhotoReading actually comes from marketing, advertising materials and testimonials. Even reviews of PhotoReading appear to come from a marketing standpoint rather than from an actual user’s angle.
It’s important to point out that the only study that has so far been conducted on PhotoReading concluded that “PhotoReading does not lead to successful and/or rapid comprehension of written text” (McNamara, 2000). It also indicated that PhotoReading may be detrimental to readers because it instils a false belief that they have understood the text. People may believe their reading goals have been accomplished, when in reality this is far from the case.
What’s more, according to the accepted theories of reading comprehension (e.g. Kintsch, 1998), successful comprehension using the PhotoReading technique should not be possible. When you PhotoRead, you’re essentially shutting off the conscious mind from the learning cycle, however, the conscious mind is essential for stimulating your short and long-term memory. True comprehension requires your mind to be engaged and this requires conscious attention and strategic processing (e.g. McNamara & Scott, 1999).
Despite this, there are people who emphatically believe the system works and claim to have experienced benefits through using it. However, they have generally had to stick at it for several months before they achieved real results, in contrast to advertising which states that PhotoReading only takes a few weeks to master.

These users say they ‘feel’ like they store the information when they PhotoRead but there is little evidence to show that they can recall and use it better. In all likelihood, any benefits gained from the system are most likely to arise from the general learning techniques you are taught during the Preview and Rapid Reading stages as opposed to the actual one page per second PhotoReading step (as claimed by proponents of the system).

If you’re interested in learning PhotoReading, be warned that it has serious limitations. It’s a costly system and you’ll still need to put in a great deal of work to experience results. Even then, you’re unlikely to achieve the effects that are advertised. So if you want to read faster, save yourself time and money by skipping PhotoReading and learn speed reading instead.

If you want to look at the best speed reading software available, we strongly recommend using Speed Reader X or ReadFaster. Either one of these two programs will do a whole lot more for you than our freebie, and they’re infinitely better than other popular options like EyeQ or others. For our full review, please see this article here.

However, since we offer the only free speed reading software on the internet, and the most accurate test of reading speed you can find, I think we’re doing pretty good here, don’t you?

First and foremost, there is no such thing as a certification for a skill like speed reading. There is no one, single entity controlling the knowledge of using these techniques, and what’s more, speed reading is not a profession. I can understand the need for having certified teachers, doctors, judges and maybe even lawyers, but speed readers? No, I don’t think so.

In addition, you never have to take and pass a speed reading test or exam to get your certification.

If you see any courses, programs, or experts claiming to have, or to offer a certification in speed reading, please do yourself a favor and avoid them. At best, they’re delusional to think that such a thing exists. At worst, they’re lying in an attempt to get your money.

What makes the teaching of speed reading difficult is that many students will pretend to get it in an attempt to make you happy, or pretend to get it so that they aren’t behind schedule. Alternatively, they may assume that it is the pace of the reading that is important, and not the understanding of the material. This last pitfall is very dangerous, and needs to be avoided at all costs.

In order to avoid this, you must make it clear to the students you are teaching that the comprehension level must at least stay the same for reading long passages, and that there are many types of writing, and many different kinds of subject matter, where speed reading is not helpful for you. During the teaching of speed reading, provide passages for students which are generally below their skill level to get them used to the types of passages that they know they can speed read, and then follow those up with something that would be a stretch for them to read and understand. This will very quickly teach them the difference between passages that can be speed read, and those which they need to pay minute attention to details.

Another important tip to teach them is to eliminate subvocalization as much as possible. During grammar school, students are often relying on this technique over-much, and are not able, as a result, to read quickly. To eliminate this bad habit, practice using “sight words” every day. A “sight word” is any word that you can look at without needing to think about it at all. Sometimes, lower-level students are taught sight words that include only words whose phonetic pronunciation doesn’t match the letters in the word (like “sigh”, “though”, and “therefore”). Upper level students should be able to quickly identify all kinds of transition words, long and short, as well as a lot of larger pieces of common vocabulary. There are many resources for flash cards of sight words online, we particularly like this set, which is a good mid-level set of flash cards. Remember, accuracy is important with these words, and so is speed of recognition. The faster the students identify sight words, the better off they will be.

For older students, concepts like finding the main idea, understanding details specifically, and thinking ahead of the text are all very important. For these students, sight words and other practice activities may be too basic, and the real speed of reading comes from understanding when an example is going to be presented, how much text the example takes place, and understanding whether or not they need to bother themselves in reading these examples. In this case, it might not be as much about learning to read faster as it is about learning to read smart.

If you have other suggestions, please comment and let me know what you’ve come up with. The more teaching strategies we have, the better off we will all be as educators.

As the owner of this site and the developer of the many applications you find here, I’ve had a unique opportunity to study some of the results (of course, as the home page states, many people blatantly cheat). Taking out the extreme results has shown that most of the people who take the test on the homepage will score somewhere around 410 words per minute.

How do you calculate that? Simple: divide the total number of words by the number of seconds it took you to read the passage, and then multiply that number by sixty.

I decided to run a more detailed study of this test. What I did was I surveyed a number of specific individuals who worked in a variety of different professions, using the test on the homepage, and without teaching them anything about how it worked, I had them take all 5 different tests, and I averaged the results. What you see below is the results I recorded:

As you can see, the average reading speed of individuals varied greatly depending on the profession of the person taking the test. Also notice what an impact the greater practice had on the test-takers. As young children aged, they got much better in reading speed, and many of those who had been out of school for some time ran into trouble – they were out of practice. People who do a lot of reading on the job were also doing much better than people who did not.

One other interesting connection to make from this study is the performance of college students. I was prompted to look at this when my brother-in-law dropped out of college after one year, and I had an inkling that the reading was too much for him. As it turns out, the dean’s list students seem to read an average of four times as fast as the dropouts. Perhaps that’s not surprising, but it does indicate that part of the average student’s struggles in college might be in keeping up with the workload. If a dropout and an “A” student were to study for the same amount of time, the “A” student would get through four times as much material as the future dropout.

What can we take from this? Reading is a thing that needs to be practiced in order for it to be mastered, so consider enrolling in a speed reading course, or purchasing some helpful speed reading drill practice software to get yourself up to the highest possible reading level. The other major concern here is for parents who are sending students off to college – take the extra precaution and teach your students how to read super-quickly before they go. They’ll thank you for it later!

What this new piece of software will do is randomly flash bits of text at you while you are working normally at your computer. The messages appear intermittently, and only for a tiny fraction of a second.

If you practice and run this software often enough, it will really help you increase your eye-reaction speed, which will help you pick up on words faster. It also works your peripheral vision, since you won’t have time to scan across the line of text. If you find that you’re doing a good job of reading the words, then you’re really establishing good habits for speed reading.

The design and operation of this software was based on the Mindzoom software, which is designed to flash subliminal messages at you. While the science of subliminal messages has a long way to go (see this article), we believe that it is an incredibly powerful way of learning to chunk and work peripheral vision. If you end up getting some benefits thanks to the subliminal messages, well, that’s good too I suppose.

While this isn’t the end-all be-all software, it will help you practice some important skills that can’t be learned any other way. And it’s free. So use it.

Download Now!

If you found this software to be helpful, please consider making a small donation using the button on the left.

If you want to practice using a more thorough piece of equipment, try some of the speed reading software I’ve reviewed here.

Subvocalization is easily the most important bad habit to eliminate when you are learning how to speed read. If you can learn how to eliminate subvocalization when reading, even if you don’t do anything else in terms of speed reading, you should notice that your reading speed will come close to doubling.

All subvocalization is is the act of pronouncing each individual word in your head as you read along the page. You may not do it out-loud, and you may not be moving your mouth when you do it, which makes it difficult to diagnose. The dialog is usually internal, but you can often hear yourself, or a narrator reading the text inside your mind. Most readers who have not taken a speed reading course will subvocalize naturally, so it is typically best to assume you’re doing it, even if you don’t notice it.

This is a terrible thing for your reading speed because you’ll pronounce those words either at the rate of speed you can speak (around 120 WPM for most Americans), or at the rate you are comfortable processing (around 150 WPM). If you looked at the chart on the homepage, you’ll notice that that’s slower than most 3rd graders can read.

Why do we all subvocalize when we read? Well, that’s actually a very easy question to answer – we were taught to do it. When you first started learning how to read, whether it was training from your teachers or your parents, they certainly had you start by reading the words out loud. It allowed them to monitor your progress with vocabulary, and ensure that you were actually reading the books instead of just saying you were. At that time it was necessary.

But now it isn’t necessary. If you’re an adult, and you know how to read, you can safely eliminate subvocalization when reading without fear of having any kinds of penalty to your reading speed. In fact, it will increase dramatically.

For many people eliminating subvocalization is actually quite simple. Once they realize they are doing it, many people become cognizant of their behavior and simply stop. For others, it requires a little more training.

Sometimes, simply reading more material will be beneficial. Texts in the same genre or subject matter will use the same kinds of language and jargon, and sometimes it’s simply a matter of practice makes perfect. This is especially true in reading business or scientific material where you are constantly learning new words and terminology. As you become more familiar with it, you will see that you become better at flying through difficult passages.

Going hand-in-hand with that is the issue of increasing your vocabulary. If you can recognize many words on sight, you’ll not need to go through your first strategy of learning words – subvocalization. The best way to increase vocabulary may be a word-of-the-day calendar if you can stick to it, or you can consider getting a book or a manual designed to teach you a number of useful words. I found that most beginning vocabulary manuals were too basic for my needs, but I particularly enjoyed Essential Words for the GRE, which is a test-prep manual that had lots of useful words and exercises in it.

Remember, speed reading isn’t something you can learn overnight – if it was, everyone would do it. You need to practice daily, and almost every time you pick up a book if you plan on ever becoming a master. We would recommend picking up a piece of speed reading software and using that to learn the skills. Once you learn it, you’ll thank me.