Would you like to learn how to speed read? It is a skill that has great value in our text based society. Let’s say that you need to read hundreds of pages for a college exam. Maybe you are a businessperson trying to skim through manuals on a new technique to boost sales. Whoever you are, speed reading is a beneficial skill that most people need. And yes, speed reading can be learned. The skill, once mastered, will give you the ability to read two times as fast at a bare minimum. Let’s begin.
Most people read word for word, taking time to concentrate on every letter on the page. You may think that this is how to understand what you’re reading, but this actually isn’t the case at all. It is much more efficient to learn to chunk words together by using more of your peripheral vision instead of focusing your eyes on a single word at a time. This will probably seen unnatural when you first try it, but it’s a matter of looking at entire sentences at once rather than single words. Your eyes and brain soon adjust to this technique, and then you’ll be taking in chunks of essential information rather than wasting time on every character. If you’re like many people, you tend to do a lot of rereading without even thinking about it. While there is nothing wrong with this when you make a conscious decision to go back and read something again, whether because you aren’t sure you understood the material properly or simply because you want to read it again, the problem arises when it is unconscious. There’s a tendency to do a lot of rereading out of uncertainty or lack of confidence in our ability to understand the material. This type of rereading will both make you a slower reader and make it harder to comprehend the material due to the fact that you keep going back and forth on the page. If you want to become a faster and better reader, then, try to reduce the amount of time you spend rereading.
Becoming speedier at reading is not enough. Furthermore, it is important to increase your levels of retention and comprehension.
The easiest method for doing this is to bring attention to the main points in the paragraphs you are reading. We are not saying that you should make every page jump out at you with too many notes and highlighted marks. It is important to pay attention to the chief details. You can go through and reread the sections that you have underlined, once you are done. Then, put the text aside and do something else, preferably something not related to studying. This lets your subconscious absorb the data you read and then you can return to the subject an hour later. With this maneuver, you will see that the speed in which you read and how you grasp things will improve quite a bit.
Speed reading is not dexterity, it is a skill therefore you should be able to learn it really quickly. Like with any skill, though, you need to practice regularly. The suggestions in this article should help you increase your reading speed quite a bit, plus you’ll be buzzing through one book after another in no time, questioning yourself about what took you so long to become a faster reader. For those that are over forty you’ll need to find a decent pair of readers before you begin your journey to speed reading.
