Pit Words: Make Fewer Stops per Line

What pit words are

The last lesson turned the inner voice down. The other half of reading with your eyes is about where your eyes stop. Left alone, they hop along almost word by word. The course’s answer is pit words: a few planned stops per line. You rest your eyes on a pit word, take in the words around it, and jump to the next one.

Each stop is short: the course stresses that the whole move takes less than a second.

Why the course uses them

The course’s reasoning starts with saccadic masking. While your eyes jump from one spot to the next, your brain blanks out the blur, so nothing new comes in during the jump. Constant small jumps also feel tiring. A few planned stops per line keep your eyes calm and moving forward.

How to place them

In the course, the founder marks the pit words on a real article before reading it. Copy the pattern:

1. Start at the second word of the first line, not the first.
2. Space the rest evenly: two or three per line while you learn.
3. Keep them in columns. Each line’s pit words sit roughly under the ones above, so your eyes fall into a rhythm down the page.
4. Adjust to the text. Long book lines and small fonts need more stops. A narrow phone column needs one, in the middle.

Here is one line of a work email with three pit words in bold: Please review the budget draft before our call on Thursday.

Then read, resting your eyes only on those stops. As the course puts it, until you’re used to it, just try to read; understanding comes as you get used to it.

What the research says

Eye-tracking research describes the same machinery, with some sober limits.

• You already read in stops. In silent reading, each stop (a fixation) lasts about a quarter of a second, and each jump covers about 7 to 9 letters (Rayner, 2009). Pit words aim for far fewer stops than that.
• Jumps cost less time than you’d think. Each lasts about 20 to 35 milliseconds, so your eyes are moving only about 10% of the time, and your brain keeps working on the text during the jump (Rayner et al., 2016). The gain from pit words comes from making fewer stops, not from saving jump time.
• The window around each stop is small. From each stop you can identify only about one word beyond the one you are looking at (Rayner et al., 2016); the next lesson explains why. With fewer stops, some words are guessed from context rather than seen.
• The second-word start fits the data. Readers’ first and last stops on a line usually land 5 to 7 letters in from the edges (Rayner, 2009).
• Speed comes mostly from word knowledge. Among 71 young adults, how quickly people recognised words predicted their eye movements better than word length or frequency did (Kuperman & Van Dyke, 2011).

So treat pit words as a rhythm that keeps you moving, not as a way to see more at once. In one study, adults who took a speed-reading course shortened their average stop from 241 to 228 milliseconds and went from about 280 to 400 words per minute, but comprehension slipped from 81% to 74% (Calef and colleagues, reviewed in Rayner et al., 2016). That is the trade you are making.

At work and in study

• Email and chat on a phone: one pit word in the middle of each line is often enough for routine messages.
• Reports and articles: two or three per line through the background sections. When you reach numbers, names or decisions, drop the pit words and read every word.
• Textbooks: pit words help on a first pass through a chapter. Read the parts you will be tested on at your normal pace.

Try it

The drill at the top of this page lights up short groups of words at 300 words per minute. Take in each group in one look instead of word by word. Then open a page of your own, mark three pit words on each of the first five lines with a pencil, and read it stopping only on those. The word-group drill on the exercises page gives you more of the same, and the reading speed test shows whether your comprehension held up.

Next lesson: peripheral vision, and what it can and can’t do.