Four tips to help you read faster
Jacob Lister | April 1, 2025
Your reading speed has never been more important to your success than it is today. The modern workplace has us constantly inundated with information — emails, memos, reports, and presentations. The amount of reading we need to sift through just to decide what’s important can feel overwhelming. Even after prioritising our work, we still need to understand and digest what we’ve read to make real-world decisions.
Most people stop trying to develop their reading skills once they leave school, which can limit their potential. But learning to read faster is simple — and doesn’t mean sacrificing comprehension. If you want to improve your reading speed, two habits can help, and two habits can hinder.
Two habits to boost reading speed
Previewing the text and reading in chunks are the two best habits to build if you want to read faster.
Preview before you start reading
Before diving into any reading, take a sneak peek at what you’re getting into. In any well-written document, you’ll find the most important information by skimming these areas.
- Headings
- Introductions and executive summaries
- The first and last sentences of paragraphs
- Conclusions
Skimming gives an overview of the content and helps you identify the most important parts to focus on. In many cases, skimming will also help identify what isn’t worth reading — the ultimate time-saver.
Skimming the text also primes your mind for the right context — reducing the need to reread sentences to confirm the meaning of any words you aren’t sure about.
Read in chunks by grouping words together
One of the most effective ways to read faster is to practise chunking. Instead of reading each word individually, group words together into chunks of meaning.
For example, ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round’ can be split into three easy chunks of meaning:
- ‘The wheels’
- ‘on the bus’
- ‘go round and round’.
The key to chunking is to land your eyes on keywords and read the filler words with your peripheral vision. For example:
- ‘the wheels’
- ‘on the bus’
- ‘go round and round’.
With just these keywords, you can paint the same picture of what’s going on without wasting effort to process every filler word.
The more you read, the more you’ll see the same phrases appear over and over again — things like ‘over and over again’, for example. This repetition makes chunking easier, as you’ll recognise these commonly used chunks of meaning. You may even start to anticipate them. Over time, you won’t feel like you’re manually trying to place your eyes to find each chunk — it will happen on its own.
Two habits to avoid
Boost your reading speed by avoiding rereading and saying each word in your head.
Stop rereading!
Many people reflexively reread sentences or phrases, often out of fear of missing something important. On the surface, it makes sense that we want to be 100 percent perfect. But the need to be perfect will prevent you from ever finding your maximum reading speed.
Instead of rereading, trust your initial reading and keep going. You can understand words or phrases that you feel you’ve missed through context clues further in the text.
And if you’ve already previewed your text, you’re going to be much more accurate at guessing what you might have missed.
Following your finger along the page can help you resist the urge to go backwards. But be careful. Anything that sets a pace for your reading can later become the upper limit to your speed. So be sure to increase the pace every so often to prevent yourself from plateauing.
Avoid subvocalisation — saying each word in your head
Many people subconsciously ‘say’ each word in their head as they read. This process is called subvocalisation, and it significantly limits your reading speed. By reading along in your head, or aloud to yourself, you limit your reading speed to your speaking speed — about 150 words per minute. This speed is hundreds of words per minute slower than your potential reading speed. By reducing or eliminating subvocalisation, you can boost your reading speed.
The best way to limit subvocalisation is to go faster, by changing the way you move your eyes.
- Take less time with each eye stop.
- Make each eye stop further apart.
Specialised tools that force your eyes along will make this much easier.
If you get frustrated that you can still hear yourself, relax. It’s ok. Allow your inner voice to trail behind what your eyes are seeing. Doing this may be uncomfortable at first, but trust that your understanding doesn’t rely on listening to your inner voice.
Want to test your reading speed?
Try our free reading speed calculator to see how much you could improve your reading.
Sign up to our workshop to practise these skills
Mastering these tips requires more than just knowledge — it takes practice to form better reading habits. To help you read faster, our Advanced Reading workshop uses specially designed tools and exercises that you can’t replicate at home.
You’ll get the chance to:
- practise chunking techniques
- use a specialised pacing tool that forces you to read faster
- test your memory to see how much faster you can read without sacrificing comprehension.
Ready to double your reading speed? Sign up for our next Advanced Reading workshop.