To examine the nature of forward saccadic eye movements in reading, eye movement records were collected from college students as they read a short passage. Forward saccades from this data set were analyzed to determine factors influencing the likelihood of any given letter in the text being the recipient of the next fixation. Data indicated that the likelihood of forward saccades taking the eyes to a particular letter position is a function not only of the distance of that position from the prior fixation, but also of the word length and the letter position in the word being read. The analysis suggests that in reading the eyes are simply sent to the next unidentified word with location preferences in the word being a complex function of length and distance. (Graphs of the data are included.) (MM)