Fixations And Skipbacks

Consider the way in which you are reading this text. Most people think that they read the way young children do- either letter-by-letter, or at  best word- by-word. The truth is, we do not read letter-by-letter or word-by-word. Instead, we are fixing our eyes on a block of words. Notice the way your eye muscles actually move when reading a printed text. Try to move your eyes to the next block of words, and go on. Effectively you are not reading words, but blocks of words at a time. The period of time during which the eye rests on one word is called a fixation. You may also notice that you don’t always proceed from one block of words to the next. Sometimes, you may move back to a preceding block of words if you are unsure about something or if you don’t understand what it meant. These disruptions to the forward flow of reading are called skipbacks.