This presumes you're scanning lines but if you really want to speed read you should scan whole blocks of text as you draw the eye down, there should be little t

This presumes you're scanning lines but if you really want to speed read you should scan whole blocks of text as you draw the eye down, there should be little to no horizontal movement when you're really reading fast. - - - - An interesting and effective method of speed reading is Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). These days it's mostly used in the context of psychological/perception studies, but it came about as a I/O method for military machines IIRC. Anyway, the trick is you display text one word at a time, in the same location, so the eye doesn't have to move at all. With a little practice and some tweaking (i.e. slight extra delay after periods and commas, that sort of thing) you can read very very fast. (For me I could read faster than my internal mental voice can speak.) - - - - There's an interesting effect where you can take some text and, for each word longer than ~5 letters, you leave the first and last letter in place but scramble all the "interior" letters. The resulting text is still legible! (I'd give an example here but I'm too lazy. Exercise for the reader, eh?)