How to improve reading comprehension as an adult
Five habits that help you understand more of what you read, and the research behind each one.
Most advice about reading comprehension is written for schoolchildren, which leaves adults in an odd spot. You can read perfectly well, yet you finish an article and realize you couldn't say what its main point was, or you reach the bottom of an email and have to scroll back up to find the one thing it asked of you.
That gap between reading the words and taking in the meaning is normal, and it has grown easier to fall into as skimming has become a daily habit for many of us (we wrote about that shift in Too long? Read it anyway.). The good news is that comprehension responds to practice. Here are five habits that strengthen it, each with a note on what the evidence says.
Read a little slower than feels necessary
Speed reading apps promise to double or triple your pace without any loss of understanding. A major review of the reading research led by Keith Rayner found that gains in speed come with a drop in comprehension, and that methods which stop your eyes from moving back over the text tend to hurt recall.
Skimming has its place, for sorting through your inbox or checking whether an article is worth your time. When you want to understand something, give yourself permission to read at a natural pace and to glance back at a sentence that didn't land.
Grow your vocabulary by reading widely
The same review found that the speed gains that do hold up come from ordinary practice, because the more often you've met a word, the faster and more easily you process it. Vocabulary grows mostly through exposure, so the simplest strategy is to read across topics you don't usually touch. A short piece on geology or medieval trade will introduce more new words than another article in your usual lane.
Put important reading on paper, or slow down on screens
A 2018 meta-analysis by Pablo Delgado and colleagues, covering 54 studies, found that people understood informational texts better on paper than on screens, especially when they were short on time. Readers on screens also tended to overestimate how much they had understood. The effect is modest and didn't appear for stories and novels, so treat it as a nudge.
If printing isn't practical, you can borrow what paper encourages. Close other tabs, give the text your full screen, and set aside enough time that you aren't racing the clock. Our guide on how to focus while reading has more ideas for keeping your attention on the page.
Test yourself after you read
Trying to recall what you read is one of the best-studied ways to remember it. In a well-known experiment, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke had students either reread prose passages or try to recall them from memory. Rereading helped more on a test five minutes later, while recalling helped more on tests days later. The effort of pulling ideas back out of your head is what makes them stick.
You don't need flashcards to use this. When you finish something worth remembering, look away and ask yourself what it said and why it mattered. The same principle explains why handing the work to a tool can leave memories fuzzy, which we cover in The skills you don't notice losing.
Explain it in your own words
Recall becomes even more useful once you put the idea into a sentence or two of your own. Writing it down forces you to notice the parts you only half understood, because those are the parts that refuse to come out clearly. A one-line summary in a notes app counts, and so does explaining the idea aloud to a friend over dinner. If you like to use AI for writing, try doing this step before you open it, an order we explore in Think first, then ask.
Making it a habit
None of these habits needs much time. What matters is doing them regularly, on texts that are interesting enough to hold your attention and short enough that you'll finish them.
That combination is what DidRead is built around. Each day you read one short passage, then answer a question about it. Some days that means finding the sentence that proves a point, and other days it means explaining an idea in your own words. Afterward you get feedback on your thinking, and over a few weeks the habits above start to feel automatic. You can read more in How DidRead works (and why we built it).