When learning to speed read, the saying that a little information can be a dangerous thing still applies. Consider the term “span of eyes.” Although I have been teaching people from all walks of life how to speed read for 30 years, it is only recently that I have received many questions about it. For new students entering my programs, the question keeps coming up early in the training. I don’t even use the term in my training. The new student has read something about it somewhere. There is too much concern about it though.

“Eye span” refers to the amount of text someone takes in with their eyes for each stop or “fixation” of the eyes. By saying “sight span”, someone has already been doing some research on speed reading. There is a lot of misinformation on the subject. It is true that part of the goal of speed reading is to allow the eyes to absorb more per eye stop (fixation). A traditional linear reader normally takes one to three words per fixation. That’s inefficient when you consider the total area of ​​clear focus your eyes have at normal reading distance. This normal area of ​​vision is between one and three inches in diameter. The view is always dimensional, that means there is both a horizontal and a vertical field.

The problem with learning to speed read and “sight span” becomes apparent due to the marketing and the fact that many programs try to teach you to widen the horizontal span. In fact, many programs, especially speed reading software programs, train well beyond the natural limitation of viewing experience which is about 3 inches using only the horizontal field. These types of training exercises attempt to stretch that span to six inches or more by telling the student to move directly down the page on a per-line, line-by-line fixation.

Remember how I pointed out that the view is dimensional? Try this experiment. Take a page of mostly text that is six to eight inches in print area and has large paragraphs. Now focus your eyes somewhere in the middle of the text. Close your eyes still. Take a pen or pencil and circle the amount of print that you can clearly see. Don’t worry about understanding the text, just focus on the clarity of the viewing experience or how much you see. Measure the area. It is probably between one and three inches in diameter. This is your natural “cone of vision.”

When you speed read, you are trying to move this “cone of vision” across and down the page. However, you don’t want to worry about how many words you’re seeing. You want your mind to search for the meaning of the text. However, without training your mind to respond and understand with these jumbled words, it will be quite frustrating because you won’t understand.

Please know that you can’t read if you don’t understand. Understanding is the key. Understanding is getting meaning from print. Too often I get students who say they learned to read the material at 1500-2500 words per minute, but they don’t get it. They have gone through visual training, but not cognitive training, nor comprehension training.

With this focus on “the width of the eyes”, the student becomes too concerned with the technical aspects of the eyes, or the mechanics, and forgets the meaning of the text. The mind is overloaded because there is competition for what it is doing. You can’t understand if you are so focused on the technical aspects of what the eyes do. So forget about what your eyes do. Push for meaning!

Throughout our years of teaching speed reading, we teach students to open up that 1-3 inch diameter and look for chunks of ideas or significant groups of words. It’s not about “word groups”, “word groups” or the number of words that is important. It is a question of stopping the eyes in the “groups of meaning”. Speed ​​reading is a process by which the reader searches for the meaning of print in a more efficient way. Eye-span only plays a part in the reading process, but it gets almost all the attention in most speed reading training.