Speed reading saves time, makes digesting large chunks of info easier and is proven to help you ship the “fluff” and only take note of the important stuff, once your brain is fully trained. Using the useful Lifehack.org Wiki, which I recommend, I’ve put together a quick guide to speed reading.
Before we start, I’d like to clear up what some readers don’t know yet. Speed Reading. What exactly is it?
Speed reading is a discipline devoted to improving both reading speed and reading comprehension.
This can be divided up into 3 parts:
- Using proper technique for maximum comprehension and speed.
- Reading flexibility
- Practice reading to improve speed>
The first thing to do is to clear up a couple myths over speed reading, here are a couple common myths:
1) You can immediately improve your reading rate without sacrificing comprehension.
Most of the scientific studies I’ve read that debunk speed reading make the false assumption that if you use speed reading techniques, you can immediately boost speed without losing comprehension. Similarly I’ve seen people try to immediately double their reading rate and expect to have the same comprehension rate. This is misleading.
Speed reading is a function of proper technique and practice. Using a pointer and other techniques can boost your reading rate just through familiarity with them, but the real benefit of speed reading takes more time and investments in practice reading.
Speed reading is a skill. As with all skills, it takes practice and patience to get just right. Nobody learned how to write or drive immediately. You have to train and get your brain used to digesting so much information quickly and effectively. The more you speed read, the wider the info channel in your brain becomes, which allows for information.
2) Practice reading is reading more frequently to get practice.
Hopefully I clarified this error in my section on practice reading. It still amazes me that some people equate practice reading with just reading more. Of course reading more will improve your rate, but it is a completely separate process from practice reading. It is called practice reading because anything you “read” while practice reading will be at a speed you can’t fully comprehend, so it is mostly wasted information.
It doesn’t take a huge investment of time in practice reading to significantly improve your speed without huge comprehension sacrifices, but it does mean you need to get a book you haven’t read and practice read it, knowing fully that you won’t understand most of the book and may need to read it again later.
This is also important. Just reading at your own leisure pace won’t improve your speed, unless you’re very slow and you still mispronounce words. Reading at your own speed at that level will only speed you up until you recognize most of the words easily. Speed reading is the next level.
Practicing speed reading is like getting improving your fitness. You run everyday, pushing yourself without going overboard (like sprinting for a mile), and as each week passes you handle the exercise with less strain. This is like speed reading, you press yourself to a point where you miss things here and there. You continue at that speed until you can handle the surge of information before moving onto the next step of improving your speed.
3) Speed reading is just skimming the material, you won’t understand it better.
This is dangerous because it is a half-truth. Speed reading is a process for reading everything, whereas skimming is a portion of reading at the upper limits of your reading rate. The techniques of speed reading are an attempt to slowly push your reading rate upwards so you can understand at a rate you used to be only able to skim.
The other benefit of speed reading is that you learn what to skim and what to slow down to a crawl. You can’t make a hairpin turn at two hundred miles per hour, but cruising an empty highway at fifty isn’t going to cut down on travel time. Similarly speed reading involves becoming comfortable moving up to your high rate, low comprehension zones of skimming and shifting down to your low rate, high comprehension zones.
The above on is self-explanatory. Speed reading gives you what you need, rather than the extra space that isn’t important.
Technique
Yes, even speed reading has a technique, a certain way of doing it. Speed reading is, as I’ve said before, a skill. There are some main steps,
this alone can boost reading by 50%.
Making use of the approximately 1″ diameter area of clear vision you have, leaving a ½ inch margin for each side of a line of text will improve your speed.
Benefits
Speed reading grants benefits, and wow do they pay off! It does take practice and time, which means great results. What you put in is what you get out however. This next quote sums speed reading up perfectly.
The real benefit of speed reading isn’t reading faster, it’s reading smarter.
Speed reading allows you to change your speed of reading. It allows you to digest what you need and speed through what you don’t want. If you find unimportant information while reading normally you’re totally stuck and can’t just race past it, all while making sure there isn’t something important in there. Speed reading could be compared to a Radar. You can analyze while reading what should be noted and what should be blinked at.
Your goal shouldn’t be to just read faster, but to read more intelligently.
Remember, if you are savoring a book and you want to enjoy it, read it slowly. When there is important info, slow down, analyze, understand it fully.
I can read some sections of books at 1500 words per minute. For these sections comprehension won’t be as high, but I can still feel confident I’m getting the value out of the sections. Other areas I read slowly at 200-300 words per minute, absorbing every word and detail to fully understand.
Practice, Practice, Practice.
The Wiki covers this section perfectly, I’ll let it take the lead.
In order to improve your maximum reading rate you need to do a process called practice reading. This is usually misunderstood to mean just reading frequently to get practice. Practice reading is a completely separate process from your normal reading.
Practice reading is like becoming fit, like I covered earlier. But you’re stuck in a hole now. How do I practice read?
In order to practice read, get a book you haven’t read before and represents the type of information you would like to begin reading faster. From there, mark your start position and begin reading faster than you can comprehend. Using a pointer is crucial here, because your goal is to move your finger slightly faster than you can actually read the words on the page.
This eventually results the following:
By reading faster than you can actually read, you are forcing your brain to comprehend with less time and less visual information. This means that you are teaching yourself how to read with less visual information by compressing small sentence fragments and words into smaller visual units.
Most people read like this
Small words like ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘on’ are often compressed into single visual units.
which is a waste of time really.
I hope this concludes your quick guide to Speed Reading!
source: Howto.Lifehack, the Lifehack Wiki
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