I always used to think that speed readers did nothing more than just skim through a book, not taking anything in and pretending that they had read it all. It’s all just one big scam, right? Wrong. Speed reading is a true art, but there are right and wrong ways to do it and, with the right exercises, the right amount of enthusiasm, you too can improve your reading speed without losing any information. In fact, done right, speed reading enables you to gather more information in less time. You too can boost your reading speed from a couple of hundred words a minute right up to near enough 1000! Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? How can anyone possibly read that many words per minute and still get any benefit, take any information in from what they read?

It might interest you to know that reading fast and being able to remember a lot more is much easier to do than you think, and it is easier than reading slowly; here’s why:

We Learned to Read Slow

When you were a child, learning to read, you were never taught to speed read. All of us are taught how to read slowly and those that do it now are simply suffering from poor habits in reading, of being taught the wrong way to read. When you change the way in which you read, you will see almost instant benefits in your speed and in your comprehension of what you just read.

On average, a person reads around 2-300 words per minute – slow, tedious, boring. Reading is so difficult at this pace. So why do we still do it?  There are three things that stop us from increasing reading speed and comprehension:

We don’t move our eyes efficiently

We reread what we already read

We don’t concentrate on what we are reading

I am going to cover these in a bit more detail over this mini-series but first, we need to look what the process of speed reading is, so you know what you can expect and what NOT to do.

Just a Habit

To end this first part of the series, you need to understand that fast reading is nothing more than a habit. As soon as you learn how to read properly, the right techniques, the sooner speed reading will become a habit. One very important thing to understand while you practice speed reading techniques is that comprehension is not important – that will come later when you have learned to read fast properly. All you are going to do to start with is change how you use your eyes, your reading habits, and your muscle memory.

As with any major changes, your priority is focusing on changing your current habits. As you brain begins to adjust, you will find that your comprehension is also increasing but don’t expect this to happen overnight – it takes time.

In part 2, we’ll look at the process by which you will learn to speed read, making the transition from a slow reader to a speed reading demon.