Speed Reading Tips

One of the most important parts of developing your study habits is to develop your reading abilities.  As you may have noticed, in college, and in business meetings, you’ll be taking more notes in class and spending more time reviewing them, so you’ll have to save time somewhere, and the easiest way to do that is to speed read.  Here are some speed reading tips to help you increase your reading speed and save time.

Speed reading tip #1 – Don’t read words, read chunks.  This is skill that will greatly increase your reading speed because your eyes will pause less often as you move them across the page.  This means you’ll be moving quicker, while still maintaining comprehension.  So instead of stopping to read every individual word on the page, You should read in chunks of two to four words that represent thoughts.  “The book” is an example of a small chunk, while you may want to group things like “is across from” as a medium sized chunk, again representing the whole thought.

Speed reading tip #2 – Don’t move your mouth while you read.  Many people “subvocalize” or say what they’re reading while moving across the page.  This can greatly impact your reading speed because you speak much slower than you think.  In general, most Americans speak at about 140 Words per minute, but you can think at the rate of 6,000 words per minute (though you certainly don’t want to try reading that fast).  By consciously limiting yourself by speaking, you’re reading at a rate slower than a third grader!

Speed reading tip #3 – Actively practice timing yourself.  It’s a good idea to get some kind of software which can measure and track your reading speed, challenging you to do better and better.  Many people think that they are getting faster without having any actual proof of the fact, and that makes learning this is a huge waste of time!  If you can watch your speed grow, you’ll know that this is working for you.  We recommend using a good speed reading software program, as it will help time and pace you, and many of them will give you visual examples of some of these tips to help you practice them.

Using these tips on speed reading will help you save time, do better work, and allow you to do your homework in half the time!  This is definitely one of the most important skills you can learn as a student.