TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR READING SPEED
The purpose of this section is to teach you how to increase you reading
speed. Shortly we will be adding a section for reading BETTER as opposed to
FASTER.
We all have a capacity for reading much faster than we typically do.
Our reading speed changes as we go through life. When we are in high school, we
go through about two hundred words a minute. We get to college and, because we
have to read faster due to more time constraints and a much greater amount to
read, we read faster. Most people in college average about 400 words per
minute. Then we get out of college, and now we don't have to read so fast.
There are no longer time constraints, and we can read slow and easy. We find
ourselves dropping back down to about 200 words per minute.
Think of reading like you do a muscle, the more you read, the better
you get at it, the faster you're going to read. And we have a great capacity
for reading faster. We aren't even scraping the surface of how fast we can
read. You see, we have 1,000,000,000,000 brain cells. In fact, the inner
connections, the synapses, in our mind are virtually infinite. It has been
estimated by a Russian scientist that the number of synapses we have would be
one followed by 10 million kilometers of zeros. Our physical capacity for
reading is beyond our comprehension. Our visual unit has the capability to take
in a full page of text in 1/20 of a second. If we could turn the pages fast
enough, our brain could process it faster than our eyes can see it. If we could
turn those pages fast enough, our eyes have the capacity to read a standard
book in six to twenty-five seconds depending on the length of the book. We
could take in the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one hour. So reading 700 -
1,000 words a minute is easily within our reach.
The key to improving our speed is to SIGHT READ, and that's what we are
going to show you how to do. We are going to start being pure sight readers.
Obstacles get in our way, however. What do we mean by obstacles? Well, these
are things that impede us from reading faster.
REGRESSIONS are the most wasteful. Regressions are going back over
words. You can call it back-skipping if you want. You go back over words you
previously read. People do it for two reasons. Initially we read it to clarify
the meaning of what we're reading. We want to be sure of the words we read as
we go along. In our early years in school, when we were first taught -
incorrectly - to "read slowly and carefully," it became easy to go
back over words.
Well, this not only slows you down, it causes you comprehension
problems. For instance, lets say you have a sentence, "The man jumped over
the log." Well, if you back-skip, you read that passage like this:
"The man jumped," "the man . . . jumped. . . over the log,"
"jumped over the log." So, what your brain is processing, "The
man jumped," "the man jumped," "jumped over the log."
Our brain is used to processing our flaws, so the brain thinks, "OK, I
know what this clown is saying, "The man jumped over the log." But
this takes time to sort out. And it's confusing. Think how much easier it would
be if you simply took the sentence in in one sight, "The man jumped over
the log." There's no confusion there. Then you move on to the next phrase.
Regressing or back-skipping is the most harmful thing we do to slow our reading
speed.
Our second obstacle is that we have BAD HABITS that we pick up. Bad
habits manifest themselves in a number of ways. For one, you've got people who
have MOTOR habits as they read. These are the people who are tapping a pencil
when they read, tapping a foot when they read, moving a book, flicking their
hand, etc. If they're sitting next to you, they drive you nuts. But they are
the people who have to be moving while they read.
Some may even move their lips. If they do that, they're kind of edging
over into another bad habit where we find AUDITORY readers. This is the bad
habit that we have that is the hardest to drop. Auditory reading is difficult
to beat because we are used to reading and hearing the words in our minds. Some
people even go so far as to mumble the words. You can see their lips moving
sometimes, or you can even hear a guttural growl as they go through the words.
The other obstacle are the FIXATIONS. Fixations are the actual stops or
pauses between eye-spans when the eye is moving to its next fixation point. We
can't see while the eye moves so you do need the fixation points to see. The
problem is, most people fixate word by word by word. They stop their eyes on
each separate word. The fixations slow you down because you are stopping on
each word.
The problem that comes up here is this that, like the other obstacles,
it impedes concentration and comprehension as well. The paradox with reading
slowly is that it really hurts your concentration.
Research has shown a close relation between speed and understanding. In
checking progress charts of thousands of individuals taking reading training,
its been found that in the vast majority of cases, that an increase in speed
reading rate has also been paralleled by an increase in comprehension. The
plodding word by word analyzation actually reduces comprehension.
In this day and age, our brains are used to constant stimulation.
Television, radio, even people talking to you, provide constant stimulation. So
when we are reading along slowly and carefully, it's kind of like watching a
movie and we encounter a slow motion scene. The slow motion scene is kind of
interesting at first because the movie has been moving along at a rapid clip
and now we have a change of pace. We've got the slow motion scene of the guy
getting shot or the couple running across to each other across a field, and the
mind initially says, "Oh, this is cool. This is something different."
After a while we get a little impatient and we're ready for the guy who got
shot to hit the ground, or the couple who are running across the field to
finally get to each other. We start thinking about other things..weve lost our
focus on the movie.
The brain does the same thing when we read. The brain is getting all
the stimulation it normally gets, then we hit this patch where you're reading
slowly. And boom, the brain says, "I don't like this. I think I'm going to
start thinking about something else." And the reader starts thinking about
the date they had Saturday night or the date they hope to have Saturday night.
And therefore, you've got another impediment to comprehending the reading
correctly.
OK, what do we do? Well, there are several things we are going to do to
increase reading speed. First of all. we are going to increase the EYE SPAN.
Eye span is the number of words that you take in as you look at the words. In
other words, if my eye span is just one word, I am going to move from word to
word to word. If my eye span is two words, I am going to move along twice as
fast. If my eye span is three words, three times as fast. If I am moving along
in phrases, I'm flying along pretty good.
That's where you increase the rate of eye span. You also want to learn
to work in THOUGHT UNITS. Thought units help you move faster. This is where you
group the words according to context. For instance, lets say you have, "He
said something." It's easy to put that in a phrase, then you move to the
next phrase. If I had this sentence, "It's safe to say that almost anyone
can double his speed of reading while maintaining equal or higher
comprehension." If I want to read that in phrases, "It's safe to say
that almost anyone.......can double his speed........of reading while
maintaining.......equal or even higher comprehension." You move much
faster that way.
So, we are going to increase the number of words we see and we are
going to group them according to context. One of the key things that we are
also going to work on is RETURN EYE SWEEP. When you get to the end of the
sentence or the end of the line on the written page, if your eye meanders back
to the other side, you have a chance to pick up words. If you're picking up
words and you're sight reading, that can be confusing. So you want to
dramatically, quickly, forcefully, go from the end of one line to the beginning
of the next one. Using a fingertip or pen as a pointer is a great way to
quickly and directly to the next line.
The other thing that helps us increase our speed is CONFIGUATION. As
you read faster and faster, you've got to learn to rely on your increased
recognition of how words are configured, how they look, as you do it. In other
words, "material" looks different than "response".
"Recognition" looks different than "perceptual". The words
have visual configurations. As you learn to read faster and faster you learn to
pick up on the configurations and, as you do better and better, your skills at
this improve with practice.
So, we are going to have no REGRESSIONS, no VOCALIZATIONS, and
increased EYE SPAN. That's the way to true sight reading. How do we do this?
First, we avoid the problem areas. We avoid the limited eye-span by
expanding the number of words that we take in. We get rid of regressions and we
get rid of the return eye sweep problem by using a pointer. You can use a pen,
a pencil, even your finger. That gives you a point of focus for your eyes. It
helps you focus on the page, and you move faster because you can dictate how
fast you are moving across the page. Your eye will follow your finger, or pen,
or pencil.
Absolutely stay away from the vocalizations. You have got to be a sight
reader. You have got to read fast enough so that you don't have time to hear
the words. This way you are comprehending simply with your eyes.
You also need to keep in mind that you don't always read at the same
speed. If you've got a car that will go 120 miles per hour, you're not going to
drive that care 120 miles per hour in a shopping center. You'd get killed and
get a heck of a ticket. But you may, on a highway when you are passing a car,
get it up to a high speed. When you are in that shopping center, you are going
to be driving about 30 miles per hour.
It's the same thing with reading. This is specifically addressed in our
Better Reading section. But you must learn that you speed read in certain areas
and there are other areas that may be particularly dense, that may have
something that's particularly confusing to you, when you will need to slow down
and read in shorter phrases, smaller groupings of words so that you can
comprehend it clearly. It may be a particularly dense passage where each word
has great deal of meaning. It may be even an unusual or specific word.
Let's look at what we've got to do to practice it. The big step here is
to simply read faster. It sounds like such a simple statement, it almost sounds
stupid. But it's what you have to do. You have to focus on "I'm going to
read faster," first.
Comprehension comes later. Practice reading without a great concern for
comprehension. In clinical terms, we call this the comprehension lag. It takes
the mind as many as ten to fifteen days to adapt to the new reading rate.
You are going to go through periods, practice periods, you can't use on
school books, but it's a practice period where you are simply adapting to
reading that much faster. Comprehension lags for a while but when it catches up
it makes a stunning difference.
A good place to practice this is
magazines or newspapers. They have narrow columns that almost make a perfect
thought unit. You can almost go straight down the column, taking that finger
and puttting it in the middle of the column and moving it straight down the
page. You will be stunned how soon you will be able to improve and comprehend
what you are reading that way. You find that it's quick. It's easy reading.
WEEKLY PLAN TO IMPROVE READING SPEED
Read 2 chptrs ---------------------------- 3 Min
-------------------------2 Min
no regressions -----------------------no vocalization
---------------Maximum Speed
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T________________________________________________________________________
W________________________________________________________________________
T________________________________________________________________________
F_________________________________________________________________________
S_________________________________________________________________________
S_________________________________________________________________________
Following this plan you will move from being a say reader, to a hear
reader to a sight reader.
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