Living in our information society poses the challenge of having to deal with a plethora of information. While most content is represented through text, keyword extraction and visualization techniques allow the processing and adjustment of text presentation to the readers’ individual requirements and preferences. In this paper, we investigate four types of text visualizations and their feasibility to give readers an overview before they actually engage with a text: word clouds, highlighting, mind maps, and image collages. In a user study with 50 participants, we assessed the effects of such visualizations on reading comprehension, reading time, and subjective impressions. Results show that (1) mind maps best support readers in getting the gist of a text, (2) they also give better subjective impressions on text content and structure, and (3) highlighting keywords in a text before reading helps to reduce reading time. We discuss a set of guidelines to inform the design of automated systems for creating text visualizations for reader support.