Reading Speed vs Comprehension

Does Reading Faster Hurt Comprehension?

Yes, once you push past your own normal pace. Read faster than that and you understand less. The further you push, the more you lose. A 2016 review of the speed-reading research found it unlikely that anyone can double or triple their speed and still understand a text as well. Between readers, though, the link mostly disappears. People who naturally read fast don't understand less than slower readers (if anything, slightly more).

So the question to ask yourself instead of whether your speed is high or low, is whether you're still reading at it. I know the difference from reading in bed when I'm tired: my eyes keep moving down the page while my mind is somewhere else. When I catch it, I go back a page, and when nothing sticks anymore, I close the book.

What a Speed Test Can (and Can't) Tell You

The Reading Speed Test I built times you on one short passage (about 200 to 400 words), then hides the text and asks three optional multiple-choice questions about it.

Those questions can catch the obvious failures: skimming, or your mind wandering off halfway through. They can't tell you whether you followed an argument, or whether you'll remember the chapter next week. Picking the right answer out of four is also a lot easier than recalling it on your own. For books, you need a check without multiple choice.

Some Self-Checks

You don't need a test to know if a chapter stuck, just a minute and no notes.

My only regular check is talking with my partner when we read the same book. We each share what stuck whenever an idea comes up, and sometimes we take different points from the same chapter. That's fine; what counts is whether you can say something specific. Here are some checks you can also do on your own:

1. Close the book and wait a bit. In one study, summaries written after a short delay made students far better judges of their own understanding than summaries written right away. Try it at the start of your next session, before you open the book.
2. Put the chapter into three sentences. For nonfiction: the claim, what supports it, and what it changes for you. For fiction: what happened, why, and what it changed. Either say it out loud or write it down, but from memory only.
3. Score it. Specific sentences mean your pace fits this book. One vague sentence means you were skimming or drifting, so slow down or go back to where you lost the thread.
4. Use it as a spot check. Whenever a book starts to feel slippery. If it fails twice in a row, slow down on that book.

For the full retention system these checks belong to, see How to Actually Absorb What You Read.

The Trade-Off Curve

The research describes a slope rather than a cliff. Every reader likely has a best pace, argues psychologist Marc Brysbaert in his 2019 review of reading-rate research. Faster than that, comprehension declines. Much slower, it can drop too, because the words arrive too slowly to join up into meaning. Your normal pace (when nobody is timing you) is your best guess for it. For most adults, that's between 175 and 300 words per minute on nonfiction, around an average of 238.

A small push costs little: in older studies, readers who were rewarded for reading faster kept most of their tested comprehension. A big push is where the real losses are. According to the 2016 review, even the most effective "speed readers" are really skimmers who already know the topic well.

Between readers, Brysbaert reports little evidence that fast readers understand less. Speed that comes from vocabulary and practice is real; speed that comes from skipping words isn't.

One caveat: "comprehension" in most of these studies means answering questions right after reading, not remembering a book a year later. The Research Behind Reading Speed covers what the studies measured, and What Is a Good Reading Speed gives you a verdict on your own number.

Where Speed Starts Costing You

Your own trade-off moves with the book in front of you. My pace is about 0.7 pages a minute (roughly 175 words per minute), below average, and that doesn't bother me. I still read The Psychology of Money fast (it has short chapters on ideas I already knew). Influence by Robert Cialdini is a slow read for me, even though I know the psychology, because it's a long book full of studies. Knowing the topic helps, but the writing also dictates your speed.

What you need from a book matters just as much. Skimming a news article is fine, but skimming a dense argument doesn't let you fully grasp the argument. I learned that after speeding through a dull stretch: the next chapter stopped making sense until I went back and read the skipped pages properly. The speed-reading tricks I once tried (finger-pacing, reading words in chunks) did the same thing: getting me through more pages (but without the retention). Here's what I do instead.

Attention costs you comprehension at any speed. In a study on mind wandering, readers reported a wandering mind on more than a third of the sentences they were asked about, and they read those sentences more slowly and understood them less. If a wandering mind is your problem too, here's how to get your focus back.

Read at the Speed the Book Deserves

Once you can check your comprehension, speed becomes a setting. There's no single right one: read the thriller fast and the argument slowly, and expect your pace to drop on hard books (mine roughly halves).

With audiobooks, the narrator sets the pace, usually at 140 to 180 words per minute. An older review of listening studies (cited by Brysbaert) found that comprehension declines slowly as speech gets faster, until about 275 words per minute, and more steeply after that. At 1.5x, typical narration stays below that point, and at 2x, it goes past. What made audiobooks actually work for me was reading the ebook along with the audiobook playing. It slowed my pace a little, but my comprehension went way up (more on that here).

And in case what you want is more finished books, add minutes instead of speed. Extra minutes cost your comprehension nothing.

Speed Is Not the Goal

If you distrusted someone's bare words-per-minute number, you were right to. Speed is easy to measure and easy to fake. Comprehension is what you actually want. Before you decide your pace needs fixing, try some of the self-checks at the start of your next reading session.