Posted on

12 Tips To Improve Your Reading Comprehension

Improve Your Reading ComprehensionAnother huge profit besides the 7 Benefits of speed reading is improving your comprehension and increasing your concentration. Allow me to explain you how:

How to Read a Book and Better Comprehend

There is a general procedure I go through to read, and comprehend a text very quickly. However, it may differ slightly from book to book, since my reading goal may also differ from book to book. For example, with an informational book I want to: 1) Get an overview of it’s most important aspects. 2) Gain insight into the essential details. 3) Understand it, value it, and evaluate it against the things which I already know. Moreover, I want to hold onto my new knowledge, and to be able to accurately translate it into my own words, and incorporate it into my conversations or writings. With a novel, on the other hand, I don’t want to get an overview, since I don’t want to know how it ends. I want to be surprised by the plot and I want to experience those surprises in the order the writer intended me to. Only in the end do I want to understand both the means and the overall message of the writer.

Procedure for an Informational Book

    1. Make a Mind Map of What you Already Know About the Subject. You create references in advance by making a Mind Map of the things you already know. As a consequence, it will be much easier to remember what you read, because you can more quickly create mnemonic versions of all the information. A mnemonic, by the way, is an information translation that aids your brain retention
    2. Read the Back and the Table of Contents. Read the back of the book, study the content, and try to make a second Mind Map concerning the coherence of the different chapters. But make this mind map in your head only. The main theme can often be derived from the main title or back cover, whereas the chapter titles will generally give clues to the sub-themes.
    3. Preview the Book using Titles of Chapters, Subtitles, and Images or Striking Words and Sentences. It is much easier to understand a text after you’ve previewed it. Tony Buzan defines previewing as: combining skimming with your knowledge of the paragraph structures of texts. By previewing, you make it easier for your brain to logically organize the information (to make an ‘internal mind map’) since you try to discover the main structure of the text. The main structure consists of the keywords and sentences that will give you the overall message of the writer. It’s like a super-concise summary. You’ll build on this key information when you (speed) read the text. But before you start speed reading, decide how much time you want to spend on each chapter. You should write this down on a Post It note which you can keep inside the front cover. Furthermore, if I haven’t read reviews on the book already, I read them now. In this way I can consider the views of others while at the same time forming my own views.
    4. Scanning and Skimming. Scanning is the search for specific information in a text, like a certain word, for example. You do it when you look for a name on a list, and you use your finger as a guide for your eyes. Skimming, on the other hand,  is a rapid search for the general meaning.
    5. Understanding of Text Structures. Information, if it’s well written, is logically organized in the text structure. So the main points should be signposted in the chapter titles and the next level information should be marked by sub-titles. After that, the first sentence of a paragraph should contain the essence of its message. The middle part of a paragraph should provide specific information and arguments that support the first sentence. And the final sentence of a paragraph should draw it all to a neat conclusion.There are three main types of paragraph:
      1. explanatory (contains the ideas of the writer)
      2. descriptive (extra …. which continues the ideas of the explanatory paragraph)
      3. linking (used to join the ideas expressed in the explanatory paragraphs)The first and the last type are most important for our purposes.
    6. Study the Content Again and Make the Second Mind Map on Paper with a Pencil. Write the main theme in the center, and use the first level branches for the sub-themes. Mostly these sub-theme branches will be made up of keywords you’ve taken from the titles of chapters. It may also be, that through the combination of review comments and your first skim of the book, you’ve already formed some ideas about the sub theme. If so, these can be noted at this stage too. Use them to populate the second level branches.
    7. Skim the Book Again. But this time with your focus on Titles of chapters, sub-titles, and first lines of paragraphs. I’ve found the first lines of paragraphs to be the most important at this stage.  They’re a simplified reflection of all that’s to be told. See point (5) for a further explanation.
    8. Complement Your Mind Map with the New Insights of the Second Skim.
    9. Now Speed Read the Book and Complete the Mind Map. While you’re reading you can underscore keywords, key sentences, and difficult words (for which you search for the meaning later). You can also write notes and any questions you may have in the blank space to the side of the text. Oh, and don’t be afraid to erase any keywords and/or branches that are no longer beneficial to you. It’s why you used a pencil, after all. TIP: Always be alert and critical while reading!
    10. Be Active. Passive reading is like passive learning. And passive learning is simply outdated. We all know that the performance of students in an active learning environment is much higher than that of students who simply listen to their teacher in silence. Ask questions and make critical remarks and your brain will become active. It will process the new information and link it to older, stored information. In short, active learning will give you access to the bigger picture. So make notes in your book and write down those questions. Like I said, always be alert and critical while reading. Your skills will improve through this alone.
    11. Have a Break…. After you’ve finished the book and you’re content with your mind map, take a small break from the text. Whilst you do so, think about what you’ve just read, embed that new information firmly within your brain, and make a neater version of your mind map. At this point you should supplement the mind map with comments or questions. If you value and evaluate the new information, it will be easier for you to store it in your long term memory. It’s the 4th and 5th step of reading as defined by Tony Buzan: extra-integration and storage.

Further Tips to Increase Your Comprehension

  • Expand Your Knowledge of Words. I think this tip is clear enough. You will lose out on so much if you don’t understand what you read. There is a saying: “People with a rich vocabulary, live a rich life”.  The more words you know, the more ways you have to express your feelings and to live and experience those feelings. It’s the same with the texts you read. You enrich your experience of a novel when you understand its every word. Only then can you read it as the writer intended.

TIP: Enrich your vocabulary every day. Take a piece of paper, or your laptop, or your phone, and write down any word you encountered, be it in the newspaper, a book, or a conversation, which you didn’t fully understand. Keep them all in a list format and go over the list regularly. With repetition you will add these words to your own vocabulary

Conceptual Difficulty

  • Do not read slower if the writing gets harder to understand. Instead, read the text in multiple ways (i.e. scan and skim a couple of times) to retrieve the main message and the essential information. Your level of comprehension will only decrease if you start to read slower. This is because you brain has to go through more steps to make sense of the syllables, than it does to make sense of the word groups. I explain this further in Speed Reading: the 7 big benefits. 

Tips to Increase Your Concentration While Reading

  • Underscore Difficult Words And come back to them. Don’t search for their meaning there and then, it will only disrupt your flow. It’s much better to underscore difficult words, continue your reading, and look them up once you’ve finished the chapter. Difficult words become clearer in context. So you’ll most likely find that you didn’t lose track the overall meaning. In fact, you’re probably only looking them up now to improve your vocabulary.
  • Take a Break Every 45 Minutes. The attention span of most humans is around 45 minutes. After 45 minutes you’ll notice it’s hard to focus. Re-gaining your focus by continually telling yourself to focus will cost you a lot of energy. It’s much better to take a break of around 10 minutes. Take a walk or do a breathing exercise. By doing so you will ‘activate’ your body once more and ensure your brain has enough oxygen.

Now you are ready for the next step…

Speed Reading Part VII: How to Practice Speed Reading?

THIS POST IS AN ITEM IN THE SERIES ON SPEED READING

  • Speed Reading Part I : The 7 big benefits
  • Speed Reading Part II : 5 Essential Tips For Preparation
  • Speed Reading Part III : Test Your Current Reading Speed
  • Speed Reading Part IV : Improve Old Reading Habits
  • Speed Reading Part V : Techniques To Increase Your Reading Speed
  • Speed Reading Part VII : How To Practice Speed Reading?

For Further Reading About How To Speed Up the Comprehension Process Of What You Read, I Recommend:

Posted on

Speed Reading: Test Your Current Reading Speed

Test Your Current Reading Speed“In any learning or self-improvement situation, it is essential to find the true base from which you start. Only an accurate assessment of where you are positioned at present, whatever that position is, will form a solid foundation from which you can springboard to your ultimate goal.”  Tony Buzan

Speed reading isn’t just about reading faster, it’s also a way to improve your comprehension and your memory. These abilities can be measured using a reading test. It’s important to do these tests, not just to find your starting point, but also to measure your progress. In this post I mention a few different reading tests and I recommend you repeat them at regular intervals.

What are Average Reading Speeds?

Tony Buzan provides us with two different statistics for the average reading speed. First, he gives an indication of the performance levels of ‘poor’ to ‘best’ readers. Then he compares the reading speeds of people at different educational levels. In the last graph you can clearly see that people at a higher educational level read much faster. Tony believes this improvement in words per minute (wpm) cannot be attributed to the gain of extra knowledge, or to better reading skills, but is instead down to motivation. It’s the pressure of having to read a lot of books, in a short space of time. Short deadlines increase effectiveness. Once there are no more deadlines, after graduation, for example, adult reading returns to primary school levels.

Every time you do the reading tests, you should look at these graphs to measure your improvement. They can be used to check both your reading speed and your level of comprehension. Once you have your results, you’ll know what to focus on the next time you practice.

Performance level Speed (wpm) Comprehension (%)
Poor reader 10-100 30-50
Average reader 200-240 200-240
Functionally literate 400 400
Best reader of a 100 800-1000 800-1000
Best reader of a 1000 1000+ 1000+

Graph of Reading Speeds of Different Educational Levels

Speed Reading Test on Paper

What you need to make your own?

  • A simple novel.
  • A stopwatch or other form of timer.
  • A count of the average words per page.

To do this last part you should:

  1. Count the words of 10 lines, add them together, and divide that number by 10. – Now you have the average number of words per line.
  2. Count the number of lines on 5 separate pages, add them all together, and divide that number by 5. – Now you have the average number of lines per page.
  3. Multiply the two totals together and you have the average number of words per page. E.G. 110 (words) ÷ 10 (lines) = 11.1 (words per line), 150 (lines) ÷  5 (pages) =  30 (lines per page), 11.1 (words per line) x 30 (lines per page) = 333 words per page
  • Now read 10 complete pages and time yourself using the stopwatch.
  • You can now determine your reading speed in Words Per Minute (wpm). You do this by dividing the number of words read (wr) by the time (t) it took you to do so. For the logically minded, that’s: wpm = wr ÷ t 

 Speed Reading Tests on the Internet

  • Ace Reader. Ace Reader is an online speed reading test where you first choose your reading level; child, adult, or advanced. And where each level contains several short stories which are followed by some questions. This is a gauge of both your reading speed and your level of comprehension, and it’s recommended you take several tests to verify your results.
  • Reading Soft. Reading Soft is another online speed reading test. This is a lot less extensive than Ace Reader and the ‘design’ of the website is not very good at all. But it can give you a quick impression of both your reading speed and comprehension level. And it also provides the general characteristics of readers at certain levels; from poor right up to excellent.

Now you are ready for the next step…

FURTHER READS

Posted on

Speed Reading and Why It’s a Must for Everyone: the 7 Big Benefits

Benefits of Speed ReadingImagine you have time to read all the books you have ever or will ever want to read. Okay, done that? Now let me tell you a secret …

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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:

  1. The phonetic method – (children pronounce the different letters of the alphabet and then combine these tones into words).
  2. 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.

  1. Recognition: The knowledge of alphabetic symbols.
  2. 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.
  3. Intra-Integration: The basic understanding. Achieved by connecting different parts of the information.
  4. Extra-Integration: The process of connecting your previously gained knowledge to the new information you are learning.
  5. Retain: The storage of information.
  6. Remember: The ability to access your stored information.
  7. 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 How to Speed Read

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: