Speed reading is the skill of consuming large amounts of text and having the ability to comprehend what was just read. Speed reading will not work if you do not learn the techniques, practise repeatedly and learn how to comprehend material that comes at you with warp speed. There are people who will attempt speed reading and totally dismiss learning the skill of high speed comprehension. This of course, is a huge mistake.
If you do martial arts, you do not start out at the black belt level. The proper thing to do, is read up about martial arts and each individual one, to understand the basics. Learning to speed read, works in a similar way. You are a white belt, a basic beginner. So to get speed reading working for you, start with something you have read more than once. It can be a special article on a topic you love or the lyrics from a long song. Read through it again and see what words are already concrete in your mind. Those are the keywords of the sentence.
You need to be very familiar with the topic before you begin speed reading and this is one reason why previously read material should be the starting point.
Progressing from white belt to the next belt means learning about the topic you want to tackle next. If you want to learn to speed read about a particular hobby you want to do, then watch some video’s first. Many hobbies have words you may have never seen before such as,”purl,” in knitting or “Caddis,” in fly tying. Purl is a technique as in knit once, purl twice and Caddis is an aquatic bug favoured by fish.
When you hit words, you have never seen before, it will slow down your speed considerably. Know your subject, then work on the speed…that is the motto. People who do not already have a large vocabulary, not only need to review the subject matter first, they need to build their vocabulary up. Learning new words daily has been shown to be a great way to make speed reading become a new skill for you.
Speed reading is much more than just trying to get your eyes moving faster over the page. There are some tactics to learn and you will have fun while practising these ideas.
Tactic 1 – When you read, do you hear a voice in your head. It may be your own as you read the words, forming little mental pictures as you go. Or you may change voices depending on what you are reading, from horror to comedy. Narration is something that is best left to people like Robert Clotworthy. He narrates a number of shows for the History Channel, and he is both loved and hated for his doubling back on words. Stop and think for a moment. Do you tend to narrate what you are reading? If the answer is yes, it needs to stop in order for speed reading to work.
Tactic 2 – Speed reading works because you learn to eliminate unnecessary words and focus on the main words in a sentence. You have already done this before but just didn’t realize it. As you read a sentence about a subject which you were very familiar with, you focused on the main words and were able to grasp the concept fully.
Tactic 3 – Distraction is one reason why people have difficulty reading more than one page in a book. You need to get rid of distractions and then do not allow your mind to wander. One way to do this, is use your finger to trace along the sentence. Your eyes are focused on just that line alone, as your mind grabs the main keywords in the sentence.
