A reader’s eyes do not move over print in a smooth manner. If they did, they would not be able to see anything, because the eye can only see things clearly when it can hold them still. If an object is still, the eye must be still in order to see it, and if an object is moving, the eye must move with the object in order to see it. When you read a line, the eyes move in a series of quick jumps and still intervals. The jumps themselves are so quick as to take almost no time, but the fixations can take anywhere from a quarter to one and a half seconds. At the slowest speeds of fixation a student’s reading speed would be less than one
hundred w.p.m.

Thus the eye takes short gulps of information. In between it is not actually seeing anything; it is moving from one point to another. We do not notice these jumps because the information is held over in the brain and integrated from one fixation to the next so that we can perceive a smooth flow. The eye is rarely still for more than half a second. Even when you feel the eye is completely still (as when you look steadily at a fixed point such as the following comma), it will in fact be making a number of small movements around the point. If the eye were not constantly shifting in this way, and making new fixations, the image would rapidly fade and disappear. The untrained eye takes about a quarter of a second at each point of fixation, so it is limited to about four fixations per second. Each fixation of an average reader will take in two or three words, so that to read a line on this page probably takes between three and six fixations. The duration of the stops and the number of words taken in by each fixation will vary considerably, depending on both the material being read and the individual’s
reading skill.

Taken From: The Speed Reading Course