Are you drowning in a sea of unread papers? Do you feel frustrated because you cannot keep up with your reading assignments? You may have wondered if you should take a speed-reading course. Or can you learn to improve your reading ability by yourself?
The good news is that if you are committed and actually do the work, you can develop your own speed-reading program at home. You can greatly increase your reading speed without sacrificing comprehension.
How do you start to improve your reading speed? The first step is to determine what your current reading speed is.
Find some reading material to practice with, such as an article in a magazine, or use a chapter of a book. Set a timer for a short period, such as five or ten minutes. Start reading at your regular speed, and see how far you can get in the time allotted. Do not try to read faster or slower than normal; the object here is to find out what your regular reading speed is. When the time is finished, mark the page so you know exactly how far you read. You will need to count how many words you read in this amount of time.
Now, using the same article set the timer again, for the same number of minutes. Start at the point in your article where you left off the last time. Do not re-read exactly the same material that you have just finished.
This time, concentrate on reading much faster than you did the first time. Go as fast as you can while still taking in every word and maintaining your comprehension. Calculate your reading speed and compare it to your first effort. Did your score improve? Try again, striving to read even faster without sacrificing comprehension.
If your performance has measurably speeded up, notice whether you feel relaxed or tense. Are you telling yourself that reading fast is hard? Many of the roadblocks you face in going faster are mental, in your mind, and can be changed.
Many people have developed bad reading habits that slow them down. See if you make any of the following errors.
When you read, do you read word for word? Or do you sweep your eyes across phrases and sentences? Trying to take in every single word will slow you down and even interfere with your comprehension. Why? Because in the English language, the meaning of sentences is built up from groups of words, from the way phrases and clauses are put together. Halting at every single word can keep you from absorbing the meaning of the entire sentence.
You can actually take in the meaning of a sentence better by using your eyes to sweep across phrases and clauses, rather than slowing down to take in each word separately.
A very common bad reading habit is called