(Video: 3 Advanced Reading Strategies to Increase Reading Speed)
So you want to take your reading speed to the next level?
These advanced reading strategies can help improve the speed at which you read without compromising the level of comprehension required to fully appreciate the reading material.
With the following methods you will be able to start reading faster today, and start comprehending more and more as you push it. These have been proven to be quite effective.
Skippity Skip Visual Reading
This is the first approach, and it’s simple – STOP reading left to right, line by line, word for word.
Start skipping words, and don’t go left to right. Instead, expand your peripheral vision to lines and paragraph to absorb more over time. This is easy to say, obviously, but you want to create a sequence of movements that you are running through across a sentence/paragraph.
If you’re not sure how this works, test yourself.
- Read a full page in a book and time it.
- Then go with this method on another page.
- Skip conjunctions, skip reading left to right slowly, and instead, start to visualize the larger sentence structure and contents, think visual reading.
You’ll be surprised how you can simply glance over lines and pick up more by just focusing on what are known as saccadic movements, like a frenzy of eye movements.
Get a book now and start at page one jumping through the text. If you’re not sure about skipping or visualizing, then start with moving forward through the text skipping larger parts of the text. Skipping over conjunctions, for instance, and not “reading” in your head will accelerate things over time, a process called “subvocalization.”
The less you spend on reading and pronouncing each individual word, the faster you’ll get, to a point where you’ll fly through narrative, textbooks, and much more with a shorter span guaranteed.
Follow Fixation Points Reading
This is similar to the previous approach above, as you don’t want to read each word on its own, but this time you should focus more on your established fixation points (e.g., 5 words per each fixation).
The natural way of reading involves not reading in a straight line word for word, but using a certain rhythm, where each “beat” ends with a fixation points.
Fixation points can also be that part of a line or a sentence where you usually place particular attention to in order to comprehend what you’re reading. This doesn’t necessarily mean skipping words though like visual reading. It just means that you focus only on a certain number of words at a time.
For example, if we choose “five words,” think of it as bouncing over five words per movement at a time.
To practice, consider the following sentences:
“Arnold Smith is just an alias. He is really John Kinsey, an ex-con who is known for being a terrible drunk whose two ex-wives left him because of domestic abuse.”
You can just pay attention to a few of those words (i.e., Arnold Smith, alias, John Kinsey, ex-con, drunk, abuse) bouncing over and still get the gist of the sentences.
In-the-Moment Alert Reading
Do NOT under any circumstances go back and read the same pages again and again.
Once you have fixated on a page, absorbed the information, continue forward. You want to pull through your entire book straight through, without going back and regressing through the words, and reading chapters over and over again because this interrupts your natural reading flow for speed – having to stop, think, and process again what has just been read.
You will cut down your reading by 1/3 if you just step away from the regressive nature of re-reading and going back to try and realize what is going on in any text.
Obviously, the first time you try this, you will be like a scrawny kid trying to lift a 100lb dumbbell, but if you push it, your brain will click and retrieve information fast.
The key here is to train your mind for “in the moment” alertness for reading.
- Think of it as a video game where the top screen is sliding down and you have to keep treading downward to avoid falling off the page, with only one shot and no “extra retries.”
- Or as a real-world example, imagine yourself reading a fast-paced teleprompter to a live-audience across the globe, and there is no room for mistake whatsoever. Period. (Do you feel that urgency to not mess up?)
This forces you to be “in the moment” alert as possible. That’s how you should approach your reading.
Here’s how to practice this:
- Open/View anything you want to read on your computer.
- Being reading, and use your finger to scroll the mouse downward at a steady pace.
- The texts will keep going up the page, and you have to keep reading downward to stay ahead of the contents.
- If you mess up or lose your place, keep going until the end.
- Try to summarize what you have retained.
- Now go back and reread the entire thing again at your usual pace.
- Compare how accurate you were the first time.
Literally Start Working On This
If you are serious about reading faster and retaining more, start working on the three reading strategies above right now.
The key to all of this is simple, start now, and keep going forward. You can’t do this if you don’t literally start working on it now.
For more speed reading techniques and in-depth look on how to increase your reading speed, check out Instant Speed Reading.