Speed reading: one word at a time with a measured pace

It is the optimal recognition point. People identify a word by looking slightly left of its middle, so the trainer works out that letter for every word and pins it to exactly the same spot on screen. The eye no longer hunts for the start of the next word, and regressions — the backward jumps that eat up to a third of normal reading time — become impossible.

Whatever the measurement gives you, plus about a quarter. An average adult reads 200–250 words a minute. Jumping straight to 700–800 usually ends with words flickering past and nothing sticking. A small margin feels like mild effort, you adapt within a few days, and then you can raise it again.

Up to a point, no: showing one word at a time removes subvocalisation and regressions, not understanding. But everyone has a limit, and it depends on the text. For fiction and familiar topics the ceiling is higher; for a contract or a technical paper it is lower. The test is simple — if you cannot retell a paragraph in your own words, slow down.

In Guide mode the whole text stays where it is and a highlight leads you through it sentence by sentence at the pace you set. It is closer to ordinary reading: you can see the context and glance back. Useful when one-word-at-a-time feels straining but you still want a pace set for you.

A technique where the first part of every word is bold. Recognition happens on the opening letters and the tail is filled in by inference, so the eye catches on fixed points and moves on faster. It works in Chunk, Sentence, Paragraph and Guide modes; in single-word mode it is pointless, because the anchor already does that job.

EPUB, FB2, PDF, DOCX, TXT, HTML, Markdown and RTF. Parsing happens in the browser, so a large book opens without an upload wait. From a PDF the text layer is used: a scan that has never been through OCR has none, and such a file will not open.

One word at a time strips everything else off the screen, which is why it is often used when attention is hard to hold: there are no neighbouring lines to catch the eye and no way to lose your place. For dyslexia we have a separate reader with the OpenDyslexic typeface, letter spacing and colour overlays — it has far more settings for that particular need.

Yes. The position is stored in your browser and keyed to the content of the text rather than the file name: the same text pasted again continues where you left off, while a different file with the same name starts from the beginning. Clearing browser data resets both the position and your measured speed.