Are you drowning in a sea of unread papers? Do you feel frustrated because you cannot keep up with your reading assignments? You may have wondered if you should take a speed-reading course. Or can you learn to improve your reading ability by yourself? The good news is that if you are committed and actually do
work, you can develop your own speed-reading program at home. You can greatly increase your reading speed without sacrificing comprehension.
How do you start to improve your reading speed? The first step is to determine what your current reading speed is.
Find some reading material to practice with, such as an article in a magazine, or use a chapter of a book. Set a timer for a short period, such as five or ten minutes. Start reading at your regular speed, and see how far you can get in time allotted. Do not try to read faster or slower than normal; object here is to find out what your regular reading speed is. When time is finished, mark page so you know exactly how far you read. You will need to count how many words you read in this amount of time.
Now, using same article set timer again, for same number of minutes. Start at point in your article where you left off last time. Do not re-read exactly same material that you have just finished.
This time, concentrate on reading much faster than you did first time. Go as fast as you can while still taking in every word and maintaining your comprehension. Calculate your reading speed and compare it to your first effort. Did your score improve? Try again, striving to read even faster without sacrificing comprehension.
If your performance has measurably speeded up, notice whether you feel relaxed or tense. Are you telling yourself that reading fast is hard? Many of roadblocks you face in going faster are mental, in your mind, and can be changed.
Many people have developed bad reading habits that slow them down. See if you make any of following errors.
When you read, do you read word for word? Or do you sweep your eyes across phrases and sentences? Trying to take in every single word will slow you down and even interfere with your comprehension. Why? Because in English language, meaning of sentences is built up from groups of words, from way phrases and clauses are put together. Halting at every single word can keep you from absorbing meaning of entire sentence.
You can actually take in meaning of a sentence better by using your eyes to sweep across phrases and clauses, rather than slowing down to take in each word separately.
A very common bad reading habit is called “sub-vocalization”. You have probably noticed that many young children who are just learning to read will sound out syllables and words to themselves. Many people continue to do this even as adults. The habit of sub-vocalization is a drag on your potential reading speed because your brain can take in and process information much faster than you can sub-vocalize.
