Measure your reading speed

It feels as though your gaze glides along the line the way a finger slides down a banister. It does not. The human eye moves in jumps. It stops, takes a sample, jumps, stops again. Each stop lasts somewhere between two and three hundred milliseconds and is called a fixation; each jump between stops is called a saccade, and during that jump you see almost nothing at all. The sense of a smooth ride is assembled afterwards, by the brain, out of the samples.

Which means that reading faster is not a matter of moving your eyes more quickly. The jumps are already close to as fast as they get. What separates a slow reader from a quick one is something else: how many words each fixation takes in, how many stops it takes to cross a line, and above all how often the eye goes back.

Going back is called regression. A typical reader regresses on roughly one fixation in ten, and almost always without noticing. Some of that is useful — the sentence was hard and it deserved a second pass. Most of it is habit, and habit is what eats the clock.

This is why the classic reading drills all push in the same two directions. Some widen the span, so that each stop earns more text. Others impose a pace that makes going back impossible, however much the habit asks for it. And a third group tests comprehension at the end, because speed without comprehension is not reading speed at all: it is page-turning speed.