Let Comprehension Catch Up with Your Speed

Speed first, then understanding

The course is clear about priorities: understanding a text, as it puts it, matters far more than reading it fast. Yet while you are getting used to reading with your eyes and pit words, it accepts that you will understand very little at first.

That is not a contradiction. It is how the course expects progress to go:

• At the start, your attention goes to the new eye habits, so little is left for the meaning.
• Each time you move up a stage, comprehension drops again.
• With regular practice at that stage, the course says, understanding slowly returns.

As the course puts it, the key to progress is pushing your speed and practising regularly.

How to let comprehension catch up

1. Stay at the new stage. Practise at it on real texts for about 10 minutes a day, instead of sliding back to your old pace when it feels hard.
2. Check, don’t guess. After a page, say the main point in one sentence, or answer a few questions about it. Feeling that you understood is not the same as understanding.
3. Use a 70% gate. Move up only when you get at least 70% of the questions right. That is the cut-off a classic study of more than 12,000 readers used before it counted anyone’s reading speed at all (Taylor, 1965, reported in Brysbaert, 2019).
4. Step down if it doesn’t come back. If a stage stays under 70% session after session, it is a skimming pace for you, not a reading pace. Keep it for the gist.
5. Allow a glance back. In the drill you keep moving, but on a real page a quick look back at a sentence that didn’t land is part of understanding it.

What the research says

The course is right that speed and understanding pull against each other. The research is less sure that understanding always catches up.

• Faster usually means less understood. The central review of speed reading concludes that going from around 250 to 500–750 words per minute with the same understanding is unlikely (Rayner et al., 2016). In one study, a course took adults from about 280 to 400 words per minute while comprehension slipped from 81% to 74% (Calef and colleagues, reviewed in Rayner et al., 2016).
• There is a ceiling. When some of the world’s best readers were tested, comprehension dropped sharply above about 600 words per minute (Carver, 1985).
• Look-backs help. Skilled readers look back on about 10–15% of their eye movements (Rayner et al., 2016), and taking away the chance to look back lowers comprehension (Schotter et al., 2014).
• The slow route works. How much people read is linked to their language skills: across 99 studies, reading habits accounted for about a third of the differences in language skills among college and university students, though the link runs both ways (Mol & Bus, 2011).

So read “catching up” this way: within the normal range, practice can make a faster pace comfortable. Past roughly 600 words per minute you are skimming, and the research has found no method that gets you past that without losing comprehension.

At work and in study

Choose your pace by purpose, not by your best score:

• Gist: email threads, news, background reading. Your stretch pace is fine.
• Understanding: reports and articles you will discuss. Use your gated pace, where you get 70% or more right.
• Study: anything you must remember. When people read expecting a closed-book test, they slowed to about 93 words per minute (Kemper & Summer, 2001, reported in Brysbaert, 2019). That slowdown is normal.

Try it

The drill at the top of the page highlights a short work text at 250 words per minute, a little above the adult average. Read along with the highlight, then answer the question at the end without looking back. If you missed it, slow the pace by 25 and try again. Then take the reading speed test: it hides the text, asks questions, and flags any result under 70% correct as not a valid reading speed.

Next lesson: 3 common speed reading mistakes, and how to use the skill.