Becoming a more efficient reader is as simple as breaking a few poor habits.
To become a quicker, more efficient reader, take these three easy steps:
- Have a clear aim in mind and accept responsibility for what you read. This will assist with organization and concentration.
- Determine what to read and what to avoid by asking yourself, “Why am I reading this?”
- Ask yourself, “Why do I need this information?”
- Before beginning to read any nonfiction material, preview it to get a sense of what it is about and which sections will be relevant and intriguing to you.
Pre-viewing gives background knowledge, allowing you to read and grasp the content more quickly while eliminating the need to reread. Once you have the background knowledge, you don’t need to keep rereading it to make sure you understand it correctly.
To summarize, becoming a more efficient reader entails overcoming misunderstandings about reading, having a clear aim, and using shortcuts to boost your reading speed.
The third stage in being an efficient reader is to master speed reading strategies. To boost your reading speed, read only the keywords while bypassing the remainder of the text. This will allow you to generate a smoother flow and prevent abrupt pauses and starts. Concentrate on locating keywords, which are the most significant words in a phrase that are longer than three characters and convey meaning.
Another method is to focus your attention on thinking clusters rather than individual words. Imagine words divided by slashes, challenging your eyes to travel quicker while retaining adequate understanding. Exercise your peripheral vision by rapidly gazing at sentences and attempting to repeat them.
Other ways to improve your reading skills include “reading between the lines” and “indenting.” Focus on the white space directly above each line to break the tendency of subvocalizing and progress through the words without becoming caught on any of them. Indenting entails utilizing your peripheral vision to target your gaze half an inch inside the left margin and finishing reading half an inch before the right margin. This decreases the amount of possible starts and stops when gazing over the lines, boosting your overall speed by more than 10%.
To practice starting a line after it has begun on the page, draw vertical lines approximately half an inch within both margins. Re-learning a skill that you already know might be irritating, but continue with it. It’s natural to grow worse before getting better, but the benefits outweigh the frustration.
Use your hand or a pen to direct your gaze and develop quick reading habits. Eyes naturally follow movement, so don’t stop practicing that ability once you’ve learned to read. Place your finger to the left or right of a line and slide it gently but steadily down to the bottom of the page. When reading narrow columns in newspapers, position your index finger in the center of the paragraph slightly below the line you’re reading.
Cover the content you’ve previously read to prevent regression. One way to accomplish this is to use business cards or your own hands. Make a fist with your left hand, then extend your thumb to the side. Hold your hand horizontally or vertically over the words you just read.
These approaches may be painful or humiliating, but they also aid in the development of rapid reading skills.