How to Increase Reading Speed


Speed reading is a powerful tool that students around the world are trying to develop.  It is not a difficult skill to learn, either.  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. 

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.  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. 

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 thoughts or 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. 

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.  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. 

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. 

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