GUEST POST: How to Read (Faster)
Read beyond the jump to find out some reasons why you may not read as fast as you wish you did! Try out these tips from our guest blogger, Lucy Adams!
About our guest blogger:
Lucy Adams is a speed reader from http://buzzessay.com. However, her writing skills are just as strong. Lucy is a passionate essay writer who’s ready to embody your wildest ideas on the paper. Feel free to supply the blogger with your suggestions and get high-quality and grounded articles in return.
Essential Tips on How to Read Faster
If you consider yourself to be an average and untrained reader, you should be aware of the fact you read too slowly. Yes, too s-l-o-o-w-l-y. At least, much slower than needed for a good understanding, and much slower than you actually can. A low reading speed of an average untrained reader is caused by three factors:
The habit of inefficient reading.
The absence of full concentration and quick reaction to the covered material.
The irrational technique of perception, which leads to loss of time on the interpretation of what have been read.
Thus, you read slowly not because you are a bad reader, but because you read inefficiently.
By the way, slow reading speed inhibits the development of writing skills. Being a blogger on this website, I do notice the dependence between reading and writing speeds and skills. Well, that’s the topic for another paper.
Before I start giving you advice on how to become a speed reader, let’s determine your current reading speed. This will be your start point by which you will measure your achievements.
Read the control text. Divide the number of covered words by the time of reading expressed in minutes. For example, if you covered 1000 words in 6 minutes and 30 means your reading speed is 1000/(6+30/60)= 154 words/min.
When carrying out the test, read at your usual speed in the same way as you normally read. Try not to let the fact that you’re passing the test affect your reading.
An average untrained reader usually reads at the speed of 175 –225 words/min. But that’s far from the real limits!
Why We Read Slowly
In all likelihood, the reason for slow reading is laziness. Usually, our mind perceives information at a comfortable, relatively low speed. It means we have acquired the habit of "leisure reading" instead of specifically and rapidly move forward to find the main ideas of the author. Sometimes we stop to think and analyze; sometimes we come back to make sure we correctly understood the text. But what we should do instead of it is constantly push ahead, highlighting the main ideas.
How to Boost Your Reading Speed
#1 Focus on the Text and Highlight the Main Idea
Once you start reading, immediately dive into the text, rushing for the basic ideas and consciously hold a high reading tempo. Read as fast as possible, but not too fast to miss the point. Well, even if you miss the meaning of some words and sentences, don’t go back! Move forward, experiment, and see what happens. Remember that your goal is to quickly identify the main idea of the text.
Set yourself a goal to understand the main ideas of the text as fast as possible, mobilizing internal resources for speed reading. Highlight the main points and don’t go into details. Follow only the main thread of the text. Read under the slight pressure of speed. Take the core and move on.
#2 Read More
You should read more, much more than you used to. If you read slowly, you probably won’t read more than a couple of newspapers and magazines a day. You’re reading whenever you have a few fee minutes, right? You’re reading whenever you want to kill time, yeah?
Now, you have to allocate a certain amount of time for reading. A recommended minimum is two hours three times a week. Fast reading will become a habit if you constantly read a lot ("a lot" means reading at least one book per week, which requires several evenings of concentrated reading).
Don’t expect god results unless you take reading for two hours three times as a habit. Well, over time, the process of reading will bring you a lot more fun, and will cease to be a routine duty.
#3 Get Rid of Subvocalization
Internal speech when reading is one of the barriers every speed-reader must overcome. At first glance, it may seem there’s no problem in pronouncing words inwardly. But in fact, silent speech greatly decreases your reading speed. To better understand the nature of this phenomenon, let’s consider the chain of information analysis:
Visual perception. 99.9% of people perceive text visually. You can see the whole page at once, so that’s the very broad channel.
Voice-Acoustic. An average person can subvocalize not more than 150 words per minute.
Meaning. We can understand an unlimited amount of information, so there are no limits like in #1.
As you see, voice-acoustic perception is the limiting factor. That’s the weak point! Exclude it, and you’ll get every chance to read faster.
#4 Develop a Panoramic Vision
The wider is your screen, the more words you can catch at once. There’s no secret our brain perceives the whole words at once, not reading each separate letter. The main point is that the first and the last letter in the word must be in their natural places.
To develop a panoramic vision, use Schulte tables.
#5 Use an Effective Reading Algorithm
Even a fast reader can’t cover all the books in the world. Thus, you have to learn to distinguish between relevant and unnecessary books. As for me, I use the following reading algorithm:
Title->Author->Source->Discussed Problem->Facts->Feedback->Applicability.
These 7 stages will help you to understand whether the book is a must-read one.
#6 Use Special Software
There are dozens of applications to speed up reading. To my mind, the most efficient technology is Spritz. It’s based in aligning the text in the most convenient to way, so the eyes don’t move to search for an optimal position for recognition. This technique allows boosting your reading speed up to 500 words per minute and more.
The main goal of speed reading is to turn the potential reading speed into a natural one. And I believe the ideas above will help you to reach your reading potential.
