Howard Berg claims to read 25,000 words a minute—the equivalent of an old-school airport paperback every four minutes. First, the good news: A skilled reader can actually tell you the plot of an airport paperback in four minutes and even correctly name its main characters. But now for a dose of reality: Howard Berg ain’t reading.

Instead, Berg is scanning, one of a series of strategies skilled readers use to consume content rapidly. These strategies also include skimming and eliminating sub-vocalizations, an aspect of reading that can include “hearing” individual words or even forming words silently with your lips.

Save yourself the fat charge to your credit card from the books and courses that claim to teach speed reading, which claim readers can take in an entire page in a single eye fixation. But in reality, any skilled and determined reader can reduce the amount of time they spend poring over scientific papers or even the latest news by following four proven practices.

Evelyn Wood supposedly drew her inspiration to create speed reading after watching her thesis advisor flip through her master's thesis and ask her questions about her research with perfect comprehension. But her advisor’s rapid reading and excellent comprehension stemmed from three key factors that Wood either naively or deliberately ignored.

First, her advisor had likely read several thousand master's theses, all of which rely on rigid conventions for their organization: introduction and literature review, methods, results, and discussion, a format that applies equally to qualitative and quantitative studies.

Second, this highly predictable format thus enabled her advisor to scan and skim........

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