Speed reader

What this cannot remove is the time your mind needs to understand a sentence. Comprehension holds up well while you are removing wasted eye movement and falls away once you are outrunning your own processing — for most people somewhere past 400–500 wpm on unfamiliar material, much higher on something they have read before. Treat any claim of a thousand words a minute with comprehension as marketing.

• Start slightly too slow. It is much easier to speed up than to recover after losing the thread.
• Use 2–4 words per flash for easy material and one word for anything dense; chunking helps most when the words are short. Past four the group is wider than one fixation and your eyes start moving again, which is the thing this was avoiding.
• Practise on something you have already read. The gap between that and cold material tells you how much of your speed is real.
• Punctuation already holds slightly longer here — the pause at a full stop is deliberate, not a stutter.

Ordinary reading is not one smooth movement. Your eyes jump between words — a saccade — and regularly flick backwards to a word you have already passed, which is called a regression. Together those account for a substantial part of the time a page takes.

Rapid serial visual presentation removes both by never moving the text. Each word appears in the same place, so there is nothing to jump to and nothing to jump back to. The letter highlighted in yellow is the optimal recognition point, slightly left of the word's centre, which is where the eye naturally lands — holding that letter still, rather than the middle of the word, is what stops long words dragging your focus sideways.