Decrease You Reading Time With These Speed Reading Tips

By Christopher Phillips


Information is growing every minute. This implies that huge amounts of material need to be read. Not to mention the number of email, documents and other material that need to be mentally processed daily. It would be very useful to learn how to read at a 1000 wpm without compromising the understanding of the material.

A normal person reads with a voice saying words out loud inside the head. There are some who even mouth the them, a process more commonly called subvocalization. The concept of speed reading is to eliminate all these unnecessary processes. There are a lot of factors that come into play to achieve a faster speed.

A general rule to studying text fast is to minimize the number and duration of getting fixated on a line of text. Speed readers do not read in a straight line, contrary to what was taught in schools. One method is taking snapshots of the text in the area of focus. This is a better way of viewing text than moving from one word to another. The goal is to decrease the amount of time one fixates on a word which is on average at . 25 seconds.

The brain is trained to recognize the shape of words and thus should follow comprehension. Another very popular studying method is skimming. In hindsight, it really is just learning which parts of the material to skip. Details tend to be forgotten after skimming.

A common bad habit of studying is back skipping. This is the subconscious rereading of what has already been read. Meta guiding, a method of reading quickly, strives to eliminate this weakness by using a pointer to make processing lines and words without going back to what has been read already. This prevents the reader from getting distracted with other visual elements.

Another recommended technique uses peripheral vision. Perceptual expansion, as it is commonly know, is essentially looking at the text at a wider range of visual focus to cover more words at a time. It works with the premise that the brain can absorb visual information and translates it into something that can be understood with little effort. With perceptual expansion, reading is not limited to focusing on one line of text at a time.

Day dreaming is another common bad habit in studying and disrupts focus and understanding. That is why there are times that even when a paragraph is read many times, nothing is still absorbed. Reading fast promotes a different way of learning and adjusting to new methods will take time. Comprehension may be temporarily compromised, but according to experts, practice will eventually fix the issue.

Increasing speed in absorbing text seems like a very useful skill, but there will always be counter arguments to an idea that says it is possible to read a 1000 wmp without comprehension being compromised. It does really seem unlikely, but nonetheless it helps to giving it a shot. Admittedly, it should be very useful for material that is not very important.

Increased reading speed is definitely a concept that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It is a great venture to be able to read that much given that information is always growing per millisecond in this day and age. But by mental default, the more words one reads at the shortest possible time will directly affect comprehension. To think that comprehension is really the point of it all in the first place.




About the Author: