Radically Increasing Your Reading Speed

Speed reading helps you to read and understand texts more quickly. It is an essential skill in any environment where you have to learn bulky pieces of information fast, as is situations like fast-moving educational and professional environments.

The Key Insight

The most important thing you need to know about speed reading is to identify what information you need from a document before you start reading. For example, if you only want an outline of the different computer programming languages, then you can skim the document very quickly and extract only the essential facts. On the other hand, if you need to understand the real detail of the document – how program X differs from program Y and Z – then you need to read it slowly enough to fully understand it.

You will get the greatest time saving from speed reading by learning to adjust your reading type depending on your purpose and need.

Technical Issues

Even when you know how to ignore irrelevant details, there are other technical improvements you can make to your reading style which will increase your reading speed.

As what we had mentioned earlier, most people tend to read the way young children do – either letter-by-letter or word-by-word. But the truth is, reading is about fixing the eyes on one block of words, then moving them again to the next block, and so on. Thus, you are reading blocks of words at a time, and not individual words one-by-one.