Speed reading is a powerful tool that students around the world are trying to develop, and people all over the world are trying to learn how to increase reading speed. It is not a difficult skill to learn, either. Despite what you may have heard or read elsewhere, speed reading takes only a few hours to learn, and a few days of light practice before you can almost double your reading speed. All it takes is a basic knowledge of the skills and techniques necessary to increase your reading speed. Following these tips, you can increase speed quite quickly and easily.
As you age, you will naturally increase your speed to a certain point, and then you will generally stagnate, or drop off as you lose practice. Reading, just like running or weight lifting, requires practice and maintenance in order to stay at a high level. Most high school students can average around 300 words per minute at some point, however, higher scoring college-level students have been known to read at the rate of 600 words per minute with high comprehension. In general, adults tend to read around 240 words per minute. This difference seems to be caused by the fact that most adults simply do not have as much contact with the written word as someone still in school would have. The more practice you get, the better.
Increase Reading Speed with Eye Speed
If you want to increase reading speed, the best thing you can do is practice moving your eyes quickly through the text. This is so important because you can mentally process over 6,000 words per minute in your brain, and while you’ll never be able to read that fast, you can think fast enough to handle more words than you think you can, if you concentrate. The difference between what you read and how fast you think is tremendous, and it shows exactly how much improvement most people need.
You should also practice your scanning skills so that you can pick up on the main ideas quickly. If you want to learn how to increase reading speed, this is essential, because often times, people will read too fast and miss all of the major points that were involved in the reading. Reading quickly requires you to focus and pay attention, but fortunately, as you learn to speed read, you’ll be able to remember more and increase and hone your mental skills to pay more attention to the details.
In general, the way you do this is related to understanding the structure of what you’ve read. Authors of both fiction and non-fiction use patterns that are unique to themselves. As you start to figure out and explore these writing structures, you can identify the most important parts of what you’re reading very quickly, and use them to your advantage. This means learning to avoid examples of things that were previously explained, and other irrelevant information, while still concentrating hard enough to understand the concepts.
You will still need high comprehension in order to be a speed reader, because without that your new skill will be worthless. If you read fifty books but remember only ten percent of the information in them, or if you get the main points without being able to explain how you know it, then you haven’t done a good job of reading. It would be much better to simply read one or two books and learn them thoroughly.
Increasing Reading Speed through Practice with Software
It is difficult to practice speed reading on your own because it is such a difficult skill to measure. We recommend practicing with the help of speed reading computer software that can track your practice. This is helpful for monitoring your progress, and ensuring that you’re doing the activities correctly. We like this software best, because this software will help you develop the skills necessary to do speed reading, like chunking, scanning and eye movement, without wasting your time on silly games or other items. They also track comprehension and speed over time, so you can see if you’re making progress. Learning how to increase reading speed without this help is nearly impossible.
One thing that you could do, if you were adamant about increasing your reading speed without a piece of helpful software, you could start with keeping a journal of your reading speed. Use the internet or books, and your word processor to type up some documents and measure them using the “word count” feature that you can find in each. Print these out and spend one minute reading as far as you possibly can in a single document. After the one minute is up, load the same document in your word processor, highlight up to the exact word you finished on, and fire up the word count feature. This will tell you exactly how many words per minute you read.
This method is far from perfect. It’s possible for you to “give it all you’ve got” for a single minute and “use up” all your brain power during that short period of time. What then happens is that you have a very inaccurate number of how many words per minute you can actually read. It’s much more accurate to read for five or ten minutes and then use that to determine what your reading speed is. This still has the same problem, however. The best method of measuring reading speed is to read an entire article and measure your time. This is the method that all speed reading programs use, and it’s used simply because it is the best way to do it.
The mathematics is complicated, but doable. Add up all of your time in seconds first and then figure out how many words you’ve read. Multiply the number of words by sixty, and then divide by the number of seconds it took you to read the article. This is the number of words per minute you’ve read.
Simply maintaining a log of your skills won’t help you increase your reading speed alone, but it can help to show you how much you’re improving, and what skills are helping you the most. This is a surprisingly good tool for you to have. Again, software is best, but in lieu of that, this is a great way to start learning to speed read.
What You Can Do With Increased Reading Speed
Think about all of the benefits that you could have if you were able to increase your reading speed. The fact of the matter is, that if you could read faster, you’d probably be much more interested in reading more books. In fact, recent surveys performed by the American Reading Company state that the number one reason why adults are not interested in reading is that they say that reading simply takes too long. With an increased reading speed, it’s quite possible for you to avoid that major problem.
As for what you can do with an increased reading speed, not only will you read more books, but you will almost certainly be considered a smarter person. Well-read people are always seen as smarter, especially if you can have intelligent conversations about the books you’ve read, or if you can quote from famous authors. You’ll naturally build a larger vocabulary as you read. It has been proven by many anti-standardized-testing organizations that the number one skill that results in increased performance on exams is not the amount of test-taking skills that are taught before the test is administered, but rather that the number of books students have read which determines how high they are likely to score.
Reading is the most important skill that you can learn, bar none. If you’re not reading now, examine why that is. Is it because you simply don’t have time? Are you bored by the slow pace of what you choose to read? Does it take you too long to get through a single book? All of these problems are easy to fix by learning speed reading and increasing your reading speed.