Speed Reading

Have you ever seen speed reading demonstrations where some person is turning pages as fast as they can, and they claim they are reading? They say they are reading 15,000 words per minute, or about 50 times faster than the average reader. They claim they can read a book in 15 minutes. Is this all for real?!

Yes. And you can read that fast, too. And understand more of what you read! But, first you have to break some bad habits.

Subvocalizing

Most people learned to read out loud. And, though they no longer read out loud, they still read at the same rate they did when they started, in grade school. They are trapped at this rate by subvocalizing the words as they read. If your lips are moving, put your finger on your lips to quiet them. If your mind is forming the words, overwhelm the mind by feeding the words in faster and faster, until the mind quits this bad habit.

Regressing

As we read, our mind wanders, and we do not pick up the thoughts we are reading about. Suddenly, our mind snaps back to the subject, realizes it has missed some material, and orders the eyes to review the material just read. This is called "regressing." This wastes a lot of time.

The first step to breaking this habit is to move your finger down the page at a regular rate, "pulling" your eyes along with it. Refuse to let the eyes bob back up the page. When your mind realizes that it will not get its way, it will begin to pay better attention.

The reason the mind wanders in the first place is that it is a marvellous thinking instrument that is capable of far greater feats than listening to ideas fed to it at a verbal speaking rate. Hence, it multiprocesses while it is digesting your reading material. As you speed up your reading rate, you will notice that the mind wanders less.

Packet Size

Your eyes and your mind function independently during reading. Your eye picks up packets of material and throws them at your mind. If your mind is paying attention, it catches each packet as it arrives, and interprets it for you. If it is doing other things (multiprocessing), your mind misses the one-time chance to catch that packet of information, and you are no longer absorbing what you read.

Your eyes can "photograph" or pick up about 300 packets of material a minute. That means, if the packet size is one word long, you are reading 300 words per minute, a very slow rate.

The first step is to expand the packet size. Combine words... read a whole prepositional phrase at once.

One thing that confuses beginning speed readers is the different function of the eye and mind. The eye does not read. It only photographs a packet of information to send to the brain. New speed readers are reluctant to "gobble up" big groups of words. "How will the brain be able to sort it out?"

We spend the majority of our lives thinking our brains are barely capable to getting us through life. In reality, the brain is one of the most phenominally powerful, undervalued marvels in this life! Introduce yourself to the power of your brain. It will amaze you! Throw a packet of words at your mind and see what happens.

The brain may not respond to the challenge immediately. After all, you've treated it like a dummy most of your life. It may be startled when you first start expecting great things of it. But, it will not disappoint you. You will be amazed at the powerhouse that God has given you.

Normally, you read from right to left, finish the line, drop down a line and read from right to left. Just like a typewriter. That's a lot of wasted motion. Imagine if your packet size became the width of the line: Then you could read down the page vertically! No wasted motion. That's your goal.

However, it may be a while before you can reach that goal. You can get a flavor for how it will feel by reading a newspaper or other narrow column text.

One More Speed Tip

Don't wait until you are done reading the page before you think to turn the page. As you approach the end of the page, with your right hand grab the upper right-hand corner of the page you need to turn. Don't slow down your reading (you can do these two things at once). As you finish the last word on the page, the page should be in motion, minimizing the wait time before you start reading the next page's text.

Checking Your Speed

Count the average number of words in a line (usually 10 or 12). Count the average number of lines on a page. Multiply the two together for the word count per page (say, 350 words per page). Set the timer for five or ten minutes and read until the timer dings. Count the number of pages and multiply by the words per page. Then, divide by the number of minutes it took to read them. This is your reading speed. Keep track so you can see how well you are progressing.

Instead of reading for a fixed amount of time, you might prefer to read a chapter, and click your stopwatch when you are done. Either way, keep track of your reading speed.

Checking Your Comprehension

Checking your comprehension is a little harder. If I were teaching you in a classroom setting, I would bring along selected texts with questions I had made up, all of equal difficulty. The number of questions out of a hundred you answered correctly, would be your comprehension.

However, you should be able to find text material with questions at the end, like school textbooks, special speed reading material, etc.

Improving Your Comprehension

There are several ways to improve your comprehension:

1) If you find out that your comprehension is suffering, try reigning in your mind, making sure it isn't multiprocessing out of boredom

2) You might try dropping your speed for a while, until your mind gets used to the faster pace

3) Keep in mind that if it takes you only three hours to read a book, instead of all week, you will forget less from the beginning to the end of the book. Less forgetting leads to greater comprehension.

Skimming or Searching

The most common misconception I encounter about speed reading, comes from people who know nothing about speed reading, but consider themselves experts all the same: "You're not really reading any faster. You're just reading the same speed, but skipping a lot of words in between!"

I hope I've convinced you that normal reading is like driving an eight-cylinder car on one cylinder... and speed reading is firing on all eight cylinders, after a fresh tune-up.

However, although speed reading is not necessarily skimming, skimming may come in handy. There is no rule that you have to read every word in the book (nor every book in the library).

Usually the first sentence in a paragraph is the topic sentence, describing the subject of the remainder of the paragraph. If you are looking for something in particular, and the topic sentence doesn't seem to cover it, feel free to skip the whole paragraph.

Or you may skim through the entire text, looking for a particular word or date. This is good practice, for it stretches your comfort zone, getting you used to a higher speed. Soon, your skimming speed will become your "full comprehension" speed.

The Best Tip of All

The three things you need to remember that will speed up your reading more than anything are:

1) Practice

2) Practice

3) Practice

Now, go do it.

The same rate they started reading with, about 300 words per minute.

Subvocalizing means to mouth the words, or say them in your mind, at the same rate you would read out loud.

The mind must not get its way: It may sound like I'm suggesting you treat your mind like a rebellious child, independent of your will. And, that's what I'm suggesting.

Multiprocessing means to do other thinking tasks at the same time that you are reading. Unfortunately, your mind is not very efficient at this, and forgets to do its first task (digesting the material you are reading). In the pre-computer days, we would have said the mind is "daydreaming," or "wandering," instead of "multiprocessing."

Wanders less: When I took my first speed reading course, I was irritated that the teacher continued talking to us during our reading tests. Finally, during one test, I could no longer hear him, and I silently congratulated him on his sudden discovery of etiquette. When the buzzer rang, indicating the timed test was over, I realized he was still speaking... had been speaking the entire test time. However, my reading rate finally was fast enough that my mind was totally involved in the flow of information, and didn't have enough time to monitor outside sounds!

Expand your packet size: This is similar to driving down the freeway concentrating only on the car in front of you. Then, you realize that you should be concentrating on your peripheral vision more, so you can keep better track of what's happening around you. Increasing the packet size is like employing your peripheral vision.

The powerhouse: As I have said already, your brain is a real miracle of undiscovered power. If you give it a chance, you will be gratefully amazed at what you can accomplish. The whole series of classes presented at the Self-Help University may seem overwhelming to you. But, I believe your brain can rise to the challenge, if you will only give it a chance!

If you are fluent with a computer, take some text on the computer and format it into a narrow column (2-3 words wide). Then, read this text vertically. Exciting, isn't it?!

Reading comprehension: For instance, if you correctly answered nine questions out of ten, your comprehension would be 90%.

Comprehension: You don't have to be testing your comprehension with questions at the end of your reading to know you just aren't getting enough.