10/12/2016

This Is How Speed Reading Really Works

By Christopher Phillips


Poor reading habits are actually a thing. With the amount of emails, documents and other written material that need to be read at working conditions, think of how much can get done if one read faster. It goes unnoticed but reading is cognitively complex. There are a lot of reasons why the average person reads at only 200 wpm with a comprehension of 60 percent of the total material.

A normal person reads with a voice saying words out loud inside the head. There are some who even mouth the them, a process more commonly called subvocalization. The concept of speed reading is to eliminate all these unnecessary processes. There are a lot of factors that come into play to achieve a faster speed.

There is a fixation on words that comes along with the slow pace of processing a string of text. This fixation is at an average of . 25 seconds for normal readers. Speed readers minimize their fixation time by absorbing the text in snapshots instead of looking from left to right, the natural horizontal direction of reading.

The brain is trained to recognize the shape of words and thus should follow comprehension. Another very popular studying method is skimming. In hindsight, it really is just learning which parts of the material to skip. Details tend to be forgotten after skimming.

Meta guiding is a method where the reader uses a pointer or his finger as a guide to read faster. The eyes are set to process a specific line and this helps increase speed and makes it easier to target the next lines without distractions. This largely helps with back skipping and rereading sentences subconsciously.

It helps to have a wider view of the overall text that is being studied. Perceptual expansion uses peripheral vision with this technique. This lets the reader process data by absorbing a lot of it without the worry of comprehending in detail. This method avoids the fixation on one line, or a sentence and instead takes in a whole paragraph.

Bad reading habits include daydreaming and disrupted focus, for example. It takes time readjust the brains functioning to read one way and then shift to another way. While this may take a toll on comprehension and enjoyment, it is said that constant practice will make up for the loss in due time.

Increasing speed in absorbing text seems like a very useful skill, but there will always be counter arguments to an idea that says it is possible to read a 1000 wmp without comprehension being compromised. It does really seem unlikely, but nonetheless it helps to giving it a shot. Admittedly, it should be very useful for material that is not very important.

Try not to quickly read every subject matter. Comprehension is still the main goal of studying. Studying faster will encourage the overlooking of important details in the content. It is okay to use this skill on unimportant emails but not on legal documents and papers that may have very vital and compromising messages.




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