Speed reading is a complex art, and many people ask just how do you speed read.
When you speed read, you start by examining the text you plan on reading, front to back. Paying attention to headlines or bolded words, all you’re doing in this step is taking a moment to look at the structure of the document, and to identify what areas the author plans on covering, and giving you at least a vague idea of the order in which they’re going to be discussed, and occasionally, you can even glean information about the author’s particular bias or point of view. During this step, you can look over the whole of the book, or if given, just the table of contents, or you could do it just for the section you’re planning on reading. Either option is just as valid as the other, although the more detail you have, the better it will be, but only to a certain extent, since you won’t want to overload your brain.
How do you Speed Read with Prereading
This is usually called prereading, and it is often the step that most individuals forget about completely, even though it can sometimes give you enough information in and of itself to decide whether or not a particular part of the text is worth reading at all, or if you can skip large sections of it and still achieve your reading goals. In addition, it lets you get an overall view of the subject matter so you can understand transitions quicker, and lets you read with great clarity.
However, there’s not a whole lot of actual reading occurring during this stage, since all you’re doing is skimming the text. It will absolutely help you speed read, but that is a secondary stage altogether.
How do you speed read with your hand
During speed reading, most individuals are trained to use their hand to guide their eyes. There are a few different techniques, from swiping your fingers across the page as you go line by line, to hopping to various chunks of words rapidly as you make your way down the page, to sliding your hand down the center of each line and using your hand to mark which line you’re on. While using these techniques will absolutely help you at first, many speed readers, myself included, believe that eventually using your hand to help you read will slow you down, so use this technique for what it’s worth, but don’t become overly reliant on it and it alone.
Everything else that happens during speed reading takes place in your mind, so people who ask how do you speed read often wonder at just what it is that is going on. First and foremost, speed readers are chunking the text. Chunking refers to breaking down a sentence into three or four word chunks instead of reading word for word. While it is difficult to describe how this happens in the brain, the basic idea is that if you read one word at a time, your eyes, and therefore your brain, stop at each individual word. If you read chunks of three or four words at once, your eyes and your brain will stop only once per chunk, effectively speeding up your reading by three or four times it’s original speed.
Speed readers are also actively analyzing the text for clues to information they can skip. Since they have already assessed the document in it’s entirety earlier, there are a lot of situations in which a good speed reader can simply skip large amounts of sentences that transition from section to section, or which go in depth into knowledge that they don’t feel that they need in order to understand the text. One of the primary aspects of speed reading that really astonishes many people is that there majority of the speed that a speed reader attains is based on actually not reading information, yet gaining the same level of clarity as someone who reads each and every word on the page.
If you want to learn how to speed read, we would highly recommend doing so with the aid of some speed reading software. We have written up several speed reading reviews of some of our favorites, or you could just visit a site like this one (which we highly recommend) and take a look for yourself.