Speed Reading Techniques You Can Practice Every Day
Imagine your increase in productivity, if you were able to assimilate information through speed reading techniques. It is possible to double your speed reading ability and still maintain 100% comprehension. There are a multitude of speed reading courses and books that with practice and patience will increase your reading speed.
In this article, we're going to focus on eye movement speed. The reason for this focus is your ability to move your eyes across the page focusing on blocks of words and skillfully increasing the words contained in the blocks is how you will begin to increase your speed reading.
In the initial phases, you will need to practice the following approximately 3 times a day in 60 to 90 second intervals. Take a sheet of paper and pencil in four dots at each corner of the paper. During your practice time, start at the top left and work your way across and down the page just as you would if you read. This develops your eye focus skills which will allow you to increase your focus of the dots over a period of time.
Additional practice to develop your eye focus skills is learning to read in chunks of words. In the business environment, where memos and new materials are consistently flowing across your desk the opportunities are endless. If you're not in the business world than a good approach would be to use an encyclopedia or some other large volume book. In learning to read chunks of words you will want to scan the page as quickly with the basic idea to simply grab larger words that are found throughout the document. You will want to time yourself for a regular size page. A maximum of 20 seconds to scan from top to bottom in trying grasp the overall concept or basic idea of the document is your ultimate goal.
After completing the exercise set the document a side. Do not be tempted to read the document. You will need to analyze for a few minutes, what you believe the actual document is about. Afterwards you go back and read the document to see if your “guess” was correct. In reality, you will never be able to scan a document in 20 seconds and fully understand or comprehend what the document is actually about. However, as you do this exercise, you will see an improvement in your overall ability to comprehend document information. Essentially, you are teaching your eyes to pick up key components of articles or documents so that you may extract this information and assimilate it in an increased manner.
The final approach to training yourself to speed read is using your peripheral vision. Move your documents away from you and positioning them in a manner that allows you to see all the words without moving your eyes from side to side. This increases your ability to pick up whole sentences within the document and wastes unnecessary time moving your eyes from side to side. You should find yourself within a few weeks, picking up whole sentences within just a couple of seconds. |
