While I haven't specified this anywhere in the one mission I've actually posted (or the half-dozen that are in various stages of being written), my agents are only capable of reading the Words for the chapter that they are in.

I thought that made a nice balance between being able to skim ahead (or back) to check stuff, while still allowing them to be surprised by stuff even if they do find the time to read ahead. After all, there may be times where they're stuck with nothing to do, and while they can just portal through the boring bits, it would make sense for agents to do as much intelligence gathering as they can. I wanted to have it so that my agents could always be surprised by something, regardless of how much time they had on their hands.

is that they can see what the Words say all the way through, though it's still possible to make mistakes. For example, in my most recent mission, Rina accidentally overlooked the fact that several noncanon two-way mirrors were used again in the story and stole them, only to later realize she had to put them back.

... I have this as a skill which most agents have, but some - specifically Agent Huinesoron - simply never learnt.

hS

The way I've written it in my missions, they can skim trough the whole fic. I use it to save time in the story. The agents can check the Words and find that there are no major canon breaks for the next two chapters, but there is a mini three paragraphs down that they need to collect. Then they can portal accordingly.
But it shouldn't get to the point where the agents aren't surprised by anything they see, because they have already read in the Words.

Like Phobos said, they shouldn't be watching the words all the time. Although I did exactly that in my last mission, but that was because they needed to keep an eye out for some potentially lethal punctuation.

The agents shouldn't have the time to sit back and read the whole story while on a mission. It is important to keep in mind that, while the story is just words to us, to the agents the story is physical and real. They should be engaged in what is going on around them. They shouldn't need to look at the words, except as a means to explain why they are experiencing something odd or to make sure of where they are portaling.

-Phobos