How to Increase Reading Comprehension
If your goal is to increase reading comprehension, then you have come to the right place. Learning how to speed read will certainly help you increase reading comprehension as well. I know that seems counter-intuitive, but trust me, it works! Here’s why:
When you’re reading quickly, you’re forcing yourself to pay more attention to what you’re reading. Many people will remove “filler” words from sentences, like “the” “is” “at” “on” and so forth which can be assumed to be there, reading only the main words and the connectors. This allows speed readers to really fill in their own details and move very quickly through blocks of text. It helps your concentration and can increase reading comprehension because this kind of reading forces you to think more about what you’re reading, what the words mean, and how different words and concepts are connected. This is almost like reviewing what you’ve read while you’re reading about it, and it engages all of your thinking power to the maximum, helping you understand better and remember more.
Another speed reading technique which helps you increase reading comprehension is moving your finger across the lines as you read. Many times, mild forms of dyslexia or laziness make you forget key words, or skip entire lines all together. By keeping your eyes focused right above your finger or pen, you will ensure that you hit every concept and key word.
Also, reading faster means that you’ve also got a much better chance of staying involved in the text. Let’s face it: most of the stuff that we have to read on any given day is very boring, yet necessary. You can eliminate some aspect of the boringness from the job by thinking about the reading as if it were a puzzle. Your job as a reader is to use all of the speed reading techniques that you know to unravel the mysteries of what you’re reading, and to extract all of the knowledge you need to know in the shortest amount of time. This can inject just a tiny bit of fun into the process of reading, and make it a little more memorable.
In general, I would simply think about speed reading this way: it’s a way to read better, while reading faster. That can make all the difference when you’re trying to increase reading comprehension.
Check out our reviews of speed reading software and speed reading courses for more information and personalized lessons on how to speed read.