We all have a capacity for reading much much faster than we typically do. Our reading speed changes as we go through life. When we are in high school, we go through about two hundred words a minute ( 200 wpm ). We get to college/university and, because we have to read faster due to more time constraints and a much greater amount to read, we read faster. Most people in university average about 400 words per minute. Then we get out of university after our first degree, and now we don’t have to read so fast.
There are no longer the previous study time deadlines, and we can read slow and easy. We find ourselves dropping back down to about 200 words per minute. We even pride ourselves as having become working professionals who don’t need to read so much.
We all have a capacity for reading much much faster than we typically do. Our reading speed changes as we go through life. When we are in high school, we go through about two hundred words a minute ( 200wpm ). We get to college/university and, because we have to read faster due to more time constraints and a much greater amount to read, we read faster. Most people in university average about 400 words per minute. Then we get out of university after our first degree, and now we don’t have to read so fast. There are no longer the previous study time deadlines, and we can read slow and easy. We find ourselves dropping back down to about 200 words per minute. We even pride ourselves as having become working professionals who don’t need to read so much.
Our reading capability is a bit like a muscle; the more you read, the better you get at it, the faster you’re going to read. And we have a great capacity for reading faster. We aren’t even scraping the surface of how fast we can read. A Russian scientist has estimated that the number of synapses – inner connections – in our brain can be imagined by thinking about a one followed by 10 million kilometers of zeros. Our physical capacity for reading is beyond our comprehension.
Our visual senses have the capability to take in a full page of text in 1/20 of a second. If we could turn the pages fast enough, our brain could process it faster than our eyes can see it. If we could turn those pages fast enough, our eyes have the capacity to read a standard book in less than 30 seconds depending on the length of the book!
Let’s consider this again. We started with 200 words per minute, probably went up to 400+ words per minute. Now we are back to 200 or less. But with some practice, reading 600 – 700 words a minute is easily within our reach.The key to improving our speed is to SIGHT READ.
Obstacles get in our way, however. What do we mean by obstacles? Well, these are things that impede us from reading faster. REGRESSIONS are the most wasteful. Regressions are going back over words. You can call it back-reading or re-reading. We do this for two reasons. Initially we read it to clarify the meaning of what we’re reading. We want to be sure of the words we read as we go along. In our early years in school, when we were first taught – incorrectly – to “read slowly and carefully,” it became easy to go back over words. Well, this not only slows you down, it causes you comprehension problems. For instance, lets say you have a sentence, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” Well, if you back-read, you read the sentence like this: “The quick brown fox,” “the fox . . . jumped. . . over the lazy dog,” “jumped over the dog.”
This takes time to resolve and confuses us. It would be easier if you just took the sentence in one sight, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” This is simple, it’s fast and what is very important for you to understand and believe is that it improves comprehension. Back-reading or re-reading is not necessary. Get rid of this habit.
Our second big problem is that we have bad MOTOR habits as we read. For example, moving the book. moving the hands, moving of the lips or mumbling, tapping the feet.
The irony about reading slowly, lips moving, is that it really hurts your concentration. Research has shown a close relation between speed and understanding. In checking progress charts of thousands of individuals taking reading training, it’s been found that in the vast majority of cases, that an increase in speed reading rate has also been paralleled by an increase in comprehension. The plodding word by word analysis actually reduces comprehension.
Having gotten rid of the 2 bad habits, ie. back-reading and the vocalized slow reading style, there is one good habit that we need to acquire. We are going to increase the EYE SPAN. Eye span is the number of words that you take in as you look at the words. In other words, if my eye span is just one word, I am going to move from word to word to word. If my eye span is two words, I am going to move along twice as fast. If my eye span is three words, three times as fast. If I am moving along in phrases, I’m flying along pretty good. In other words, you need to read in larger THOUGHT UNITS. Thought units help you move faster.
One other thing that will help is to ensure we get to the beginning of the next line without reading the some of this line’s words in reverse – RETURN EYE SWEEP. Some kind of a pointer or just using your finger to guide your sight and focus immediately to the beginning of the next line is helpful.
As your finger travels across the lines, try to read fast enough so that you don’t have time to hear the words. This way you are comprehending simply with your eyes. Some sections you’ll read VERY fast and maybe in some other more dense sections, you will need to slow down a bit just like with heavy traffic when you’re driving.
Now for the practice. The big step here is to simply read faster. It sounds like such a simple statement, it almost sounds stupid. But it’s what you have to do. You have to focus on “I’m going to read faster,” first. Comprehension comes later. Practice reading without a great concern for comprehension. In clinical terms, this is called the comprehension lag. It takes the mind as many as ten to fifteen days to adapt to the new reading rate.
Comprehension will lag for a while but when it catches up it makes a stunning difference. A good place to practice this is magazines or newspapers. They have narrow columns that provide good thought units. You can almost go straight down the column, taking that finger and puttting it in the middle of the column and moving it straight down the page. You will be surprised at how soon you will be able to triple your reading speed…
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