Words appear one at a time in the same spot, so your eyes never move. The
method is called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, or RSVP. It has
been studied since the 1970s, and it does one thing very well and one
thing badly. Both are worth knowing before you lean on it.
Why your eyes never move
Ordinary reading is not smooth. Your eyes jump (a saccade), then
stop and take in a few characters (a fixation), then jump again,
four or five times a second. You are effectively blind during each jump.
Roughly a tenth of reading time goes into moving your eyes rather than
reading with them.
Presenting one word at a time in a fixed position removes that motion
entirely. Nothing has to be located before it can be read.
The red letter
Every word is aligned on one letter, shown in red. Recognition is fastest
when the eye lands slightly left of a word's centre, a spot known as the
optimal recognition point. Because that letter stays on the same
pixel for every word, short or long, your eye has a fixed anchor and the
word forms around it.
What the research actually supports
Speed: yes. Removing eye movement genuinely lets you take in words
faster than you can scan a page.
Comprehension: it is a trade, not a gift. This is where speed
reading claims tend to overreach, so it is worth being plain. The best
current review of the evidence, by Rayner, Schotter, Masson, Potter and
Treiman (So Much to Read, So Little Time, Psychological Science in
the Public Interest, 2016), concludes that the limit on reading is not
how fast your eyes move but how fast your mind turns words into meaning.
Speed past that and understanding falls off, and it falls off hardest on
unfamiliar or dense material.
RSVP also removes something you use more than you notice. Around one eye
movement in eight is a regression, flicking back to re-read a
phrase that did not land. Readers do this constantly, mostly without
realising, and it is a real part of understanding hard text. A word at a
time gives you no way to glance back.
So: faster, reliably. Better understood, no. What it is genuinely good at
is attention. It is very hard to drift off, because the words do
not wait for you.
Getting the most from it
- Start around 200 to 250. That is ordinary reading speed. The number here is a true words-per-minute, so raise it only while comprehension holds.
- Slow down for dense passages. Narrative carries far better at speed than argument, law or poetry.
- Turn on narration. Seeing and hearing a word together gives attention a second anchor, and the pace stops feeling forced.
- Stop and look back often. Tap the screen and the whole chapter appears with your place marked. This is the regression the method takes away, handed back deliberately.
- Read it twice. Once fast for the shape of the passage, once slowly for the meaning, beats one anxious pass.
A word about reading Scripture this way
This is a good tool for covering ground and for staying present in a long
passage when your attention is thin. It is a poor tool for study. Slow,
re-reading, marginal-note reading is where Scripture actually opens up,
and no presentation method substitutes for it. Use this to read more
often, not to read faster than you can think.