Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

4 steps for Speed Reading

I've recently heard lectures, gone through audio programmes like Paul Scheele's PhotoReading, and various other related text, inorder to find out, if there is anything like "speed reading". And yes indeed there is, it is not a myth. However what I've learned from different sources always boils down to the four basic steps which I'm going to list here, following these steps may save you $100s in saving on lectures, seminars or books on speed reading, and hours on reading text.

1. Quit "Auditory reading": Many people I know tend to read a text, by pronouncing individual words. This is a bad habit which can seriously limit your reading speed. Humans can speak only about 300 words/min, so if you tend to read the text out aloud then you are seriously limiting your reading speed.
2. Quit "Regressive reading": Regressive reading is an act people perform while reading, when they go over a portion of the text again and again, like repeating a paragraph they just read. This obviously limits reading speed, but someone may counter by saying that they read a paragraph repeatedly because it contains some important information and they want to focus however this is a weak argument if you consider this with the next point.
3. Anticipate the purpose: By anticipating the purpose of an article, chapter or a paragraph, we can read across them very quickly. Because if we set our mind to anticipate a certain purpose in reading a paragraph then your mind automatically discards irrelevant information in the text and just concentrates on the main highlights. If we anticipate that some important section of the text is coming up then you can slow down to read it more carefully, and then speed up when redundant explanations start coming.
4. Use peripheral vision: Peripheral vision is the area of vision which is surrounds the thing you are focusing on like while reading this text, you might be focusing on a single word, however you are actually seeing more than a word, you are also seeing the surrounding words. By concentrating on more words in a single glance you can significantly improve your reading speed. For example, most newspapers come in multiple column formats, ever wondered why? This is to facilitate speed reading of the material. By presenting a limited number of words per row, we can focus on the entire row in a single glance, and read the entire article more quickly. Many research publication formats do this aswell. The IEEE two column format is very "speed reading" friendly. However the LNCS/LNAI single column format is not, because a single row contains more words, one has to read a single row via multiple glances.

A note for computer readers, like me, is that reading off computer monitors is a bad idea, because time and again I find myself being interrupted and stop reading in order to scroll the page. I prefer to have papers printed so I can speed read them without having to scroll the page every once in a while. However because there is a lot of stuff I read on the computer, that's why its pretty expensive for me to print everything, so in these scenarios I really recommend in getting a high resolution LCD monitor, which can display lots of text in a single view, with appropriate brightness and sharpness.

Once I started speed reading, my eyes would start hurting this was due to the fact that my eye muscles were under developed and could not move quickly enough. However like any muscle, it evolves and improves with usage, the more you read the less it will hurt the longer and more you will be able to read.

You can take a speed reading test from here . My score was 822 Words/min with 91% comprehension.