Speed Reading: How to Improve Your Reading Ability

by Carl Anderson

Finding it difficult to concentrate? If you find your mind wanders when you're studying, you may actually be reading too slowly! If you read too slowly your brain has spare capacity, so your thoughts will wander off on a tangent. This section will introduce you to  Speed Reading  — simply, reading faster; also to  Skimming  a text to get a quick overview, and  Scanning  a text to quickly find relevant information. You can easily train yourself to read more quickly — if you are willing to practise. Physically, when reading, your eyes move jerkily across a number of "fixation points". ( You can see this if you get a friend to sit down opposite you. Ask them to follow your finger with their eyes, as you draw a large circle in the air in between the two of you. You will see that their eyes don't follow your finger smoothly, but jump from point to point in a sort of hexagonal pattern in the air). Speed readers don't try to take in and understand each and every word. They don't "read aloud" in their head. Speed readers read in "blocks", thus maximising the number of words they read in any "fixation". So... The aim of skim reading is to get the general idea, gist or overview of a text and its content, not to have a detailed understanding of the text. As Woody Allen illustrates, "I read War and Peace.... it's about Russia". Scanning is what you do when you read very quickly for a specific piece information. For instance, when looking up a number in a phone book. Use headings and titles and formatting clues (e.g. bold text, indented quotations) on the page to help you home in on what you're looking for. Don't try to read every word.

102 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 6, 2017