How To Read Faster In 6 Steps

    Many people wish if only they knew how to read faster since it would be very helpful in their lives whether to make them enjoy more reading or to minimize the amount of time they spend reading. Well reading fast or slow is a result of certain actions as it's the case with everything, so everyone can actually read faster if they adopt the right habits that I'm about to share with you

1-Concentrate and focus your mind before reading

    What a lot of people make as a mistake is they put themselves in a situation where their mind is not going to fully concentrate on reading.

   The distraction may come from the outside like a noise or a source of distraction in the space where you are reading, or the inside when for example we have a problem that we could not stop thinking about or when we feel tired.

    So when you start reading in these two above situations it will take up more time to process the phrases and to grasp their meaning leading thereby to reading slowly. the point here is to try to get in a place where you're not likely to get distracted then free your mind and concentrate on reading.

    Sometimes you will be confronted to read in public places so try at least to focus on reading instead of what's happening next to you.

2-Scan and skim the text before starting

    Many of you might think that this practice would make them slower instead of faster in reading but the experience shows the opposite, it's because when you grasp the full meaning of a text or a page of a book, you're a more likely to read it faster by avoiding re-reading and stopping in the middle of a paragraph to understand better its meaning which are two bad habits that slow down your reading speed.

    So in order to read faster, you will have first to analyse the text or page in front of you by looking at important points such as headings, bold words, beginnings, centers and ends of paragraphs, bullet points, images or graphs if any exists, once you feel you have an a general idea about the text move on to normal reading.

    Sometimes scanning and scamming might not be as effective as we think, especially in fiction novels, but as we practice it we get better at it thereby reaping more fruits from this technique and minimizing our reading time.

    If you're more interested about this technique and want to find out in detail about it, I recommend This Article.

3-Avoid sub-vocalizing as much as you can

     Yes sub-vocalizing means saying words in your head while reading, Many people sub-vocalize when reading but you have to know that it's a habit that slows down drastically their reading speed. I understand that it's the way we all learn how to read but at one point we must give up this practice in order to increase our reading speed.
   
     Let me explain why it's such a problem: when you say the words you limit your reading pace to the speaking one of  around 300 words per minute which is pretty slow compared to the number of words your eye can analyse per minute.

   If you don't sub-vocalize which is rare it's a good thing, but if not what's required from you is the practice of constantly seeing and analyzing phrases without saying the words and re-correcting your behavior each time you catch yourself  doing the opposite thing until you break this habit.

   You can distract your tongue and your mind from saying the words by chewing gum, listening to music, counting from 1 to 3 each line(it depends on you), or  following with your finger while reading.

    The key here is to reduce as much as you can the number of words you say in your head and thereby avoid the process of seeing-saying-hearing-understanding and replace it with seeing-understanding. If you're interested in breaking this habit check out This Training as it gives more advanced stuff to do.

   Keep in mind that it take time to break habits especially the strong ones, and remember that saying words out loud will also slow you down like the sub-vocalization does.

4-Read group of words by group of words instead of word by word

     What many people do is read word by word which slows them down since it takes more time and energy for your eye and mind to analyse single words rather that small phrases. The average eye-span is 1.5 inch which is around 3 words.

      The point here is to start seeing one block of words after another instead of single words in order to speed up your reading time, notice here that this practice is easier and more effective when avoiding sub-vocalization.

      It will be hard in the beginning to follow this principle but overtime you will get more comfortable and start doing it more correctly as all the other practices. If you want to find out more about this technique called chunking I recommend you read This Text.

5-Don't read every single part of a text or book

     This advice is only for ones who don't want to enjoy every part of a book, but who want only what's relevant to their purpose from reading.

      What I recommend those people do is try to skip the parts of a book or text that they feel are not important to them (to their goals), yes because in some cases we read more than we actually need, which make us waste both time and energy.

      The point of this practice is to try to skip and avoid headings that you assume may not help you. And even in the paragraphs in which you are interested there may be phrases that do not hold any value for you, you can identify them from their beginning and skip them.

     This technique can be very useful and save you a lot of time without affecting your overall degree of comprehension.

6-Stop re-reading

   It's one of the very bad habits that makes you waste precious time and slows down your reading speed. In an experiment the subject spends 30% of his reading time in regression(Which is when you consciously move back in order to read a sentence you didn't understand) and back-skipping(When your subconsciously move back in the process of reading).

     What you need to realize is that re-reading won't bring much to your comprehension level, and most of the time you will understand by referring to the context, so if you want to save extra time we're talking here about 30% for an untrained subject as pointed out in This Blogpost written by Tim Feriss author of The 4-Hour Workweek.

     This is why you will have to make conscious efforts to break this habit by convincing yourself that re-reading will slow down your reading rather than increase your understanding. I agree that sometimes you will have to stop at certain points of a book or text to make sense of what's the writer is trying to convey but those situations are occasional.

Conclusion

     I'm sure that if you apply the 6 principles mentioned above you will end up seeing huge progress in your reading speed, not only that but you will benefit from more reading in shorter periods of time.