Practice Activity

In order to avoid reading every word, you must increase the rate your eyes move across the
page. As a practice activity, choose an easy material for to read. Sweep your eyes faster across the page than you’ve ever done before. Do not mouth the words; do not even mentally say them.

Start with short practice periods, e.g. 3 minutes, record your rate (how many words have you read in 3 minutes?), and then continue with longer periods or with texts that are more complicated.

The First Steps in Speed Reading

In reading, your starting position and reading gesture is relevant: sit up straight, with the book
being held by your left hand, and with your right hand doing the pacing.

Being already a good reader is a plus factor in attempting to speed read. Otherwise, it may be
quite difficult and may take some time. Speed reading program will not work if you have problems comprehending and your vocabulary is too little. In fact, rushing through things you can't understand is actually useless. Yes, you may be able to read fast, but you just won’t understand what you will be reading.

Speed Reading Tips

Read until the end! Do not get tired, discouraged, or bored; don’t just stop reading when you
want to. Don’t you know that ideas do become clearer the further you go with the reading materials?

After you finish reading, recall the things that you have learned, return to the ideas that seem unclear, and reread them in order to grasp their ideas. When you begin to read, you should:

· Be able to find the answers to the questions you’ve come up with

· Answer guide questions at each chapter (you may see these questions at the beginning or at the end of the chapter)

· Take note of the important words and phrases – underlined, italicized, and bold printed

· Read only one section at a time, and recite the summary of each section afterwards

· Do not ignore captions under pictures, tables, graphs, etc.

· Carefully read and absorb difficult passages. On parts which are not clear, don’t be afraid to
stop and reread

Knowing How Deeply to Study the Material

Where you only need the shallowest knowledge of the subject, you can skim the material.

This is done by reading only chapter headings, introductions and summaries.

If you need a moderate level of information on a subject, then you can scan the text. Here you
read the chapter introductions and summaries in detail, but may speed-read the contents of the chapters – picking out and understanding key words and important concepts. At this level of looking at the document, it is worth paying attention to diagrams and graphs.

Only when you need detailed knowledge of a subject is it worth studying the text. Studying is
skimming the material first to get an overview, and afterwards reading it in detail while seeing how the information presented connects to the overall structure of the subject. An effective method of getting the deepest level of understanding on a text is to use a formal method such as SQ3R (discussed in a later post).

Do you read every article of every magazine, or every chapter of every book? If so, you're
probably spending a lot of time reading stuff you don't need. Remember: You don't need to read all of what you DO read. Be choosy.

Remember - Select the chapters and articles that are important. Ignore the rest!