Time to dive in and start learning the speed reading techniques.

Techniques 1 - Using Your Eye Muscles More Efficiently

Although you can’t really watch your own eyes when you are reading, you can watch someone else’s, and you will quickly see just how inefficient they are, with lots of unnecessary movement.

When you read, your eyes are like an instant camera, they take a quick snapshot of what they see. When you stop moving your eyes at a certain point on the page, it's known as fixation and, as we are taught to read one word at a time, we do an awful lot of this fixation while we read. This is one of the things that slow you down and put up a barrier that stops you reading faster. You need to train your eyes not to stop quite so much and, if you can do this, you’ll be surprised at how much more you can read.

Each time you fixate on the page, your eyes can see more than a single word and by learning to read several words each time you fixate, instead of just one or two, you can increase your reading speed significantly.

Speed Reading Exercise

Get a book, anything, it doesn’t matter what, and start learning how to move your eyes more efficiently.

When you read, start with the second word of each line. Fixate on that word and on the second-to-last word of the line. You will find that you won’t be fixating on any blank margin spaces.

Try this for two minutes and see how fast you can read – do not worry about comprehension at this stage – and try fixating no more than once for every three words on each text line.

Technique 2 – Kick Regression to The Curb

By this, I mean rereading. When you keep going back over what you have read, you are not being terribly efficient. We call it regression when you consciously reread – you have made a conscious decision to stop what you are reading and go back to a part you already read, mostly so you can understand it better.

Fixating on the incorrect spot is called unconscious rereading and it tends to involve your eyes moving from one line to another or losing your place on the page.

There are a few reasons why you would go back and reread something, not least for better comprehension, and some readers, well most of us really, tend to keep losing our place, perhaps through distraction. Rereading, backtracking, whatever you want to call it, is very inefficient and it's what makes many of us such slow readers.

There is some good news though!

There certainly is! It is very easy to fix your problems with both unconscious and conscious rereading and it involves one very simple speed reading exercise – all you need is a piece of text and a pointer, much like the teachers used to use in school. To find out how to do this, read part 4 of this speed reading series.