Endless long reports, never-ending pages to read, and documents that need to be delivered as soon as possible.
Whether it's for business or finishing a fictional book, speed reading techniques can make your life much easier. Techniques can help you increase reading speed while still keeping up with the subject, understanding what you read well, and preventing loss of meaning while reading fast can also help you take your reading ability to the next level.
Thanks to these techniques, you can engage the subject and without getting bored quickly. Speed reading techniques help you to finish your work more quickly in a more practical way, and are easy habits to adopt.
Some of the leading successful business people can finish a book in a day or two and still keep on top of their to-do list. But how? How do people who have such a busy work schedule, find time to read so many books?
Experts on speed encourage readers to focus on the main theme of the paragraph and read directly to help our brains maintain the data. Here are 5 ways to improve your reading time for faster, more accurate reading.
1. Stop the Inner Monologue
Internal monologue refer to an internal voice that repeats itself inside your head when you read a book or report. This reduces your reading speed and focus, causing you to read more slowly.
This is one of the most important factors hindering your reading speed. For this reason, you should read the content and focus only on the content, without speaking silently to yourself.
Voices may occur in your head while reading. This is quite natural, as a result, your brain is in an active state and at the same time, concentration switches between the page and your inner voice.
Teachers teach children to read aloud in primary school. The most basic reason for this is that the ability to learn will be formed more easily by using the sense of sight and hearing at the same time. It is also difficult to for your inner monologue to chime in while your speaking.
However, we stop reading aloud as we get older. Internal monologue habit then begins to develop as you read inside your head. Adults who are trained in speed reading, first learn to suppress the inner monologue one sentence at a time. Sometimes, reading aloud like they did when they were children, helps.
According to statistics, the average reading speed is 300 words per minute. This is also almost the same as the speaking rate. So this means that if you want to read faster, you must do so faster than your speaking speed.
The speed of your inner monologue is also the same as your speaking speed. Therefore, readers who maintain the internal monologue will constantly read at the speaking rate.
This is the most important rule you have to break. If you want to gain faster reading skills, you will first need to learn how to silence your inner monologue.
2. Word – Chunking
Word-Chunking is one of the most effective actions that can help you to remove your inner voice. Eventually you will be able to read every long paragraphs much faster and more quickly thanks to this technique, which starts with you reading a few words at the same time in chunks instead of reading one word at a time.
The key here is to achieve full concentration by catching your focus more broadly. If you can't focus enough, you may experience a loss of meaning in the sentences you read.
People generally tend to read words one by one while reading a book. Although you try to read fast, if you are reading the words one by one, it will not gain much momentum.
Reading multiple phrases at the same time can be a bit overwhelming at first and can sometimes cause semantic shifts.
But as you continue to practice this technique, your brain will get used to it and you will be able to read much faster.
At first, try to read an average of 3 words and gradually increase the number of words you read at once over time. After continuing this practice for a while, you will easily see the difference.
3. Do Not Reread the Words on the Page
One of the key points of speed reading techniques is not to go back and re-read the words you have read.
This both creates a break during reading and slows down your reading speed considerably.
So there is no going back. If you want to gain speed reading ability, you should not constantly revise your reading. If you need to take notes, take notes there and then.
If there is a paragraph that you don't really understand, you can go back and read it again, but don't waste time re-perceiving small inexceptional words.
4. Use Peripheral Vision
The techniques described so far were to break sentences apart and read them in phrases. It's time to go to the next level!
What you need to do now is to try to read by focusing on a single line instead of focusing on the words.
The action of reading line by line will speed you up like never before. Although it is a bit challenging at first, this is a skill that you can gain with a little practice.
5. Use a Timer
After working on all these techniques, it's time to put yourself to the test. Before starting your speed reading journey, time yourself for 1 minute and see how many words you can read.
After a little pratice of all these techniques, repeat the process and see if you are able to read more.
If you are someone who struggles to sit and read for long periods you can take a spin on this technique to increase your reading time. Time yourself for the minute, then increase the minutes and note how many pages and how long it took you to read in general.
In this way, you will learn how much progress you have made and practice your ability to focus. Both of these skills and valuable and will be a huge help in times when reading and concentration is required.
