Speed Reading Tips

These are the basic Speed Reading Tips you need to know

If you have trouble reading at a reasonable speed and retaining what you read, you may be fixating.  Fixation in reading is when your eye stops on a letter or word while you are reading.  You might be interested to know that the average person fixates about four times per line on each page of a book. The good news is that your brain does ‘see’ and process the information beyond the edges of your fixated focus.  If you practice, you can find a rhythm and flow in reading, and read at a continuous pace, thus starting speed reading.  With average vision, you can see and process ten to twelve letters at a time. Here are some other quick tips you can use to avoid fixation on a particular word or letter and to improve your reading speed and comprehension:Think of reading as a ‘pick and choose’ activity, where you can choose to read the words and phrases that are critical to comprehension, and skip over the connective tissue.  Connective words like ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘the’ and ‘are’, can get you stuck on the minutia. 

If you are reading word-for-word, you will probably become stuck on little words that do not give you much information for your effort.Train yourself to read more quickly by forced timing.  If you are a runner, training for a race, you go out and run every day and you try to improve your time or your distance.  Set a timer and run a reading race every day for two to four weeks.  You do not have to spend more than five minutes on this exercise.  You may become frustrated, at first, by the fact that you cannot read as fast or remember as much as you would like. 

However, you will improve, with practice!  When you sit down to read an article or a book, test your comprehension after every reading session.  Mentally challenge yourself to remember as many things as you can about what you just read.  Again, you will improve with practice. When reading an introduction, executive summary or other overview information at the beginning of a book or article, try to slow down a bit and focus on the groundwork the author provides.  Then, you can fly through the rest of the information, knowing what the author wants to tell you and what they wish to accomplish in writing the article.  While there are lots of other methods and techniques to improve your reading speed and comprehension, you may not have the time or the desire to implement a long-term program to break old habits and establish new techniques.  If you do nothing more than practice the techniques presented in this article, you will see an improvement in your reading speed and in your ability to retain the information you read.