Rapid Reading Techniques

1. Raise your speed- comfort level. How comfortable
are you speeding in a car? How fast do you have to go before you feel
you are “on the edge?” 70 MPH? 90? 120? How about 210 MPH, the speed
the Indy car drivers can average? Get the point? Some people have
learned to drive faster; their comfort level has been raised. You can
do the same thing for reading. Face it, speed-reading isn’t mostly
about technique; it is about mind set. Indeed this may be the reason
you can play a CD while reading — you are merely driving along at
25MPH. Can you imagine an Indy car driver playing music in the
background? No. The driver focuses all his or her skills on the track.
If you are out for a Sunday afternoon stroll in your book, then ignore
this. But if you are serious about becoming a speed-reader, then start
expecting more of yourself.

2. See the book as a mine full of ORE not GOLD. Books
offer wonderful gold to the prospector. But the reader must sort
through tons of ore to find and refine the gold. The speed reader
changes mindsets: quits fooling around with the ore and searches for
the gold. What is a book anyway? What are words? They are “carriers” of
truth, thoughts, ideas, a thesis, information, terms, concepts,
notions. One reads a book to get the message, not to obsess on the
words. (I’m tempted here to talk about Bible study, but we shall let it
pass this time.) Switch your mindset to looking for the gold.

3. Quit Subvocalizing. Most of us learned to read by
sounding out the words. The trouble is, most of us never stopped. Sure,
maybe we no longer audibly sound them out, or even move our lips, but
in our heads we are “reading to ourselves.” We have learned to read by
Mouth-and-Ear. To become a speed reader one must discard this habit (or
at least reduce it) and adopt the eye-and-mind method. It is mostly a
matter of mind set. Instead of acting like the ear (even in one inside
your head) is the route to the mind, begin believing that the eye is
the gate to the mind. Start drinking in books through your eyes. Let
the books pass into the mind directly from the eye, skipping the mouth
and ears. Go ahead and start trying it.

4. Use your finger. For most beginning speed-readers
this is a shock. They remember reading in grade school with their
finger and assume it slows one down. Actually the finger is your pace
car. It leads you forward at a speedy pace, and keeps you on focus and
avoiding back-skipping. There are several ways to use your finger (or
hand) but just try it out for starters. As you improve, buy one of the
books on speed-reading and settle on the pattern which works best for
you.

5. Break the Back-skip habit. Most of us read along a
line of type like this one to get the interpretation of the meaning,
but as we read our eyes jump back to dwell on a word we just passed. We
do this without knowing it. In fact, probably the only way to discover
how many times you back skip is to have someone watch you read and
count the eye-darts back. But, unless you have someone you feel pretty
comfortable staring you in the face while you read, just trust me –
you probably back-skip. How to stop? First confess you do it. Then
start recognizing when you do it. Finally when tempted to back-skip,
treat the book like a movie — that is, even if you miss something in a
movie, you don’t stop the video and replay it. You just let it flow on
through, hoping you’ll make it up later.

6. Use your peripheral vision. Just like you must develop a
muscle in the gym, so your mind can be trained to use the eye-gate to
take in a broader amount of data. For instance, instead of reading left
to right across the lines, pretend there is a line right down the
middle of this page and you are following the line. Let your eye take
in through peripheral vision the phrases to the right or left. Can you
do it? With practice you can train your mind to read on “both sides of
the road” even though your eyes are on the center line. To practice
this skill most speed readers actually draw lines down pages of a book
until they have mastered the skill with an invisible line. Let your
mind drink in the information on the page without looking directly at
it — just like you “see” the sides of the road when driving an
automobile.

7. Learn to read KEY WORDS. 40-60% of the words on a
page are neither critical nor important. Indeed, if someone took
white-out and hid them from your sight, you could still figure out what
the paragraph was communicating. So, it stands to reason that if you
could figure out which are these KEY WORDS you could scan past the
other words and let your mind fill in the blank. Train your mind to
find these key words and you’ll add even more speed to your reading.

8. Eliminate “Bus Stops” (Eye rests). As your eyes
read down this line they stop periodically and “rest” on a word.
Children’s eyes often rest on every single word as they learn to read.
Then as you grow your eyes move smoothly down the line like a lawn
mower, then you stop a split second on a word, then start back up
again. Most reader never get over this habit, but like a bus stopping
at every corner, it slows down your progress. Try to reduce your eye
rests to 3-4 per line, maybe even less as you get better… keep the eye
moving smoothly line after line, letting your mind drink in the
knowledge on the line.

9. Take breaks. The research is clear. Steady reading
hour after hour is less efficient than taking a five minute break every
hour or less. Sit down to read 100 pages in the next hour. Set an alarm
even. Then reward yourself with a cookie or sandwich when you’ve
reached your goal in 60 minutes.

10. Set a time goal. Have a 300 page book to read?
Decide how fast you’ll read it. If you are not a speedy reader, maybe
you’ll only set the US average reading speed as your goal: one page a
minute (250 words/min.). Or if you are already an above average reader,
set 100 pages an hour and plunge in. If you picked 100 pages an hour,
that’s 50 in a half hour, 17 per 10 minutes or 1.7 pages per minute.
Keep on track… pretend like you are in an auto race… push yourself,
concentrate, get yourself out there on the “racer’s edge” — the line
just short of out-of-control, yet still in command. Do it; it will be
exciting!