Unfortunately, or fortunately as it turned out, when I was in Uni the first year wasn’t going at all well for me. I passed only half of the exams I took, and at the speed I was working it was going to take me double the time I had to finish off all my studies. Added to that was the fact that there was more information being printed in just one hour, than a human being living 100 years ago would have to learn in their entire lifetime. I just had to find a way to read faster.
So overnight I decided to take massive action and researched as much as I could about reading and learning as fast and effectively as was humanly possible. But before I share with you just how I did it, let me share with you how speed reading saved my Uni grades, allowed me more time for fun, and continues to improve my life.
TIP: Everybody has 15 minutes a day. And if you use that 15 minutes every day to read then at an average speed of 250 wpm (words per minute) you will finish an average size book (90000 words) in 24 days. Keep going and you will read an average of 15 books per year.
If you triple your reading speed (easily do-able after reading these posts), you will now be reading 45 books per year. The thing is, you can actually quadruple your reading speed within 30 days. Just don’t make the mistake that I made and start reading self help books before you go to bed, you will not be able to sleep.
The 7 Big Benefits of Speed Reading:
Speed reading is a super-powered technique which will accelerate the speed you learn and enable you to understand more of what you read. When I applied it, I doubled my reading speed in 3 hours, so think about this: It will take you just 3 hours to double your reading speed and to understand things more easily. After that, you’ll have the ability for the rest of your life
- Time. Time is your most valuable commodity. Your success or failure, in anything you do, depends greatly on how effectively you use your time. Speed reading is a cheap and easy way for you to buy more time.
- Better Focus. Everybody can learn to read at least at 500 wpm, but the actual average reading speed is still the same as it was in the 19th century (around 200 wpm). Why the big gap? In the coming articles, I will explain why the traditional reading style is not very efficient and how Speed Reading helped me to build focus.
- Better Understanding and Comprehension. When do you pay more attention, when you are driving at 80 km/h or 180 km/h? In the next posts I will explain how speed reading will improve your concentration and focus.
- Improving Your Memory. The phrase “Use it or lose it” most definitely applies to the brain. The brain is a muscle and by training it, it will perform better and at a higher level. Also, when you train your brain to take in the information faster, your memory will also improve.
- Logic Training. As I mentioned already, reading is an exercise for your brain. When you train your brain to read faster, something amazing happens. Your brain becomes more efficient, both at sorting out the new information and at finding links to other bits of information you have stored there. The more you improve your reading speed, the faster this process happens and you will automatically notice the improvements in your logical thinking processes. You will find, for example, that when you play games of logic such as chess, you are actually better at them. But these improvements will spill over into your everyday problem solving too.
- More Opportunities in Your Life. When your reading speed improves, you will find that more and more information is entering into your mind and staying there. As a result of this, you will further find that many pieces of an ‘information puzzle’ will now join together and create a complete picture. In this way you will see patterns in your life that you just couldn’t notice before. Patterns that will give you greater choice, more opportunities, more options. The freedom to choose and to have many choices is important for your self belief. Speed reading, therefore, will allow you boost your confidence by enabling you to take full control of your life, and to achieve more with it than you previously imagined.
- Relaxation. Reading is a very relaxing pastime, no matter how and at what speed you do it. It can help reduce stress because it removes your thoughts from your worries and your burdens. Indeed, the right book can make all of your negative thoughts go away. It can change your mood in an instant. When you read faster, you will be even more absorbed into the material. Speed Reading enables you to shut out the world and to really lose yourself in whatever it is you are reading. This is also known as active-meditation; a state you might reach in order to release tension and increase your emotional well-being. Try it for one month and you’ll really see the difference.
Speed Reading Basics: The Concept of Reading
Do you say words in your head while you’re reading? Do you often need to re-read a piece of text? Are you easily distracted? Then you are reading too slow for your brain. You see, your thoughts go so much faster than the speed at which you talk. So when we take in information too slowly, our brain starts thinking of something else. The solution to this problem? Read faster!
How to Read Faster
There are definitely a few tips and tricks which will help you to instantly read faster, and I will give you some of those very soon. But before we get to the Speed Reading techniques, I will explain the general understanding of the reading process – and tell you what’s wrong with it. Then, I will tell you what these speed reading techniques are, and explain the scientifically proven theories they are based on. I will also advise you on the best environment for your speed reading adventure.
Our Current Understanding of Reading
Most people assume that the way to read is to let your eyes slide continuously over the lines on the page, reading each and every word, syllable by syllable, and sounding them all silently in your head. This perception of the reading process originates from the way we were taught to read as children. Tony Buzan (sponsored link) distinguishes between the two main teaching methods:
- The phonetic method – (children pronounce the different letters of the alphabet and then combine these tones into words).
- The see-and-say method – (children are shown images and asked to describe what they see).
Both methods mean that when the child is reading on their own, they do so by first saying the words in their mind. This is called sub-vocalization.
Misunderstandings About the Concept of Reading
We assume that our children are able to read when they can go through a book in silence. But this is the reading equivalent of learning to drive in a sports car and then taking to the road in a lawnmower. This means that any further developments in your reading skills can only be small ones, especially if you’re only ever doing day-to-day reading, the kind that takes place out of the college or university environments. It’s like learning, over time, to take the corners a little quicker in that lawnmower of yours. So maybe, in the end, your child will learn to read at a speed of 200 wpm. Well, most grown-ups, continuing with the same lawnmower method, will only get to about 250 wpm. A college or university attendee might push themselves, through strong will power and stronger coffee, to 400 wpm. But that’s still just the equivalent of putting a slightly faster engine into the same tired old lawnmower. With a little effort you can easily reach 1000 wpm, and if you really want to go pro then 3800 wpm awaits for the Formula One or NASCAR driver.
Some of you will be reading all this and saying: “Hey, but surely speeding up will actually decrease my understanding of the text” . This isn’t true though, since it is such an energy consuming process to go from syllable, to word, to sentence, to overall message. Evelyn Wood ,(sponsored link) a speed reading instructor, believes an average person thinks at a speed of 5000 wpm. This same person, however, will be reading at that same old lawnmower speed of 250 wpm. This is why many students get bored and frustrated while reading – because they think so much faster than they read. Moreover, most texts contain a lot of wasted words so there’s usually a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t even need to process. The message, in fact, will often be clearer without it.
Fun Fact:- Did You Know that people only recently learned how to read in silence? Which means before that time they could only read out loud. Can you imagine a library in which everybody is screaming so they can hear themselves above everybody else?!
The Correct Application for Reading
The ability to join the sounds of some letters and to correctly sound out a whole word, does not make you a good reader, I’m afraid. True reading consists of much more than that. Like understanding the text and forming your own opinion about it. Buzan defined several phases in the reading process, and they all need to be worked on if you want to super-charge your reading skills.
- Recognition: The knowledge of alphabetic symbols.
- Assimilation: The physical process in which light is reflected by the word, received by the eye, and transferred through the optic nerve to the brain.
- Intra-Integration: The basic understanding. Achieved by connecting different parts of the information.
- Extra-Integration: The process of connecting your previously gained knowledge to the new information you are learning.
- Retain: The storage of information.
- Remember: The ability to access your stored information.
- Communication: The ability to share your stored information by means of talking, writing, and visualizing, for example. But also just by thinking upon it – by sharing it with yourself in your head.
How the Physical Activity of Reading Really Works 
Your eyes do not move in a continuous flowing movement over the words, but instead, are guided by the visual processing center which can be found in the back of your brain. These are small jumps from left to right, with a pause. Only during the pause, which is the most time consuming part, is the information taken in. A slow reader uses twice as many pauses due to the fact that they are both consciously and unconsciously jumping backwards for a ‘better understanding’ of the text. A fast reader fixates on larger groups of words without jumping backwards. It is an understanding of this process which forms the basis of speed reading.
A Better, Faster, Stronger Reading Method
Now that we know how reading actually works, will we be able to improve and accelerate our reading process. We will do this by:
- Giving a new meaning to ‘sub-vocalization’
- Reducing the duration of fixations
- Taking in larger groups of words for each fixation
- Eliminating jumping backwards and regression
- Using your peripheral view
But before we get to speed reading techniques, we will first discuss the ideal mindset to have and the best conditions for doing it. We will go through 7 steps in total, and by the end of them you too will be a speed reading champion. They are listed below and you can read about them in the following posts about Speed Reading.
This post is an item in this series about speed reading
FOR FURTHER READING ABOUT HOW SPEED READING CAN BUY YOU TIME, I RECOMMEND:
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