How to Give Your Reading Speed a Boost

In college and in life in general, you may find yourself in situations where you have to read and comprehend large amounts of material in a short amount of time. In this article, I'll share tips on how to boost your reading speed.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. First, to read faster you're going to have to put aside a lot of things that you've been taught in school, which were done with good intentions but that you've just outgrown. Many people were taught how to read by reading aloud in class--nothing wrong with that, but it leads to you reading aloud inside your own head as well when you read silently. This is one of the main things that slows people down--an extra step of sounding the word out in your head even though you actually can comprehend it when you initially see it.

2. To show how getting rid of this step can help you, try reading something you're comfortable with for 10 minutes the way you would normally (I have a separate article below under "Resources" on how to do this). Write down your words per minute.

3. Now read a different set of material for 10 minutes (can be in the same book but just not the same exact section you did earlier--because memory alone would throw off the results). This time take your finder or a pen and trace along the words at a moderately fast pace as you read, not letting your brain stop long enough to sound out the word but still at a rate you can still comprehend the material. Your words-per-minute should go up pretty significantly.

4. Another thing you can do to get through material faster is looking over Chapter introductions and summaries before you read the main text (so you already have an idea what to expect). You can also over time find ways of letting your eyes take in groups of words at one time as opposed to dwelling on each word individually--with practice, you can learn to only focus on what you need and ignore filler.

5. You can also practice reading as fast as you can--possibly even beyond your comprehension--and then try slowing back down. Often your new "slower" rate is still faster than the rate you were reading previously.

6. Keep in mind this is also going to vary with the material--you can't do these techniques with everything, and sometimes you wouldn't even want to do them (such as when you're reading for enjoyment). This is mainly to help you with reading textbooks and taking in only important information out of a much larger section of words.

Resources

• How to Estimate Your Reading Speed
• More eHow Articles by Cougar1002

[Wasatch]

on 1/13/2009 Definitely something I would like to do.

[ladym33]

on 1/11/2009 Thank you, I will certainly give these tips a try.