SpeedRead to Increase Productivity
May 21st, 2007 by 
Chris Pangburn
Most of us spend a great deal of time reading, whether it be a blog, emails, articles, or news releases. Reading can occupy quite a lot of your time without you realising it - even if you only spend one hour per day reading, that adds up to a lot of hours per year! You might have heard about photo-reading or speed-reading, or heard what seem to be unrealistic claims about increasing your reading words per minute (WPM) to many thousands, and those that claim to read thick books in a few hours. Well speedreading can definitely improve your time reading, and for the mere mortal of us, even if you can’t make the 15,000 WPM, you can at least double your current reading speed if you follow some easy to use techniques, and practice with a fun free website application…
There’s a few main aspects to speedreading, which include cutting out the sub-vocalising, using a guide, and not backtracking. As with most things it requires practice, but at least its a skill you can develop for free. Here are the techniques in a bit more details:
- Stop Sub-Vocalizing - You might not have realised it, but the vast majority of people say each word in their head when they’re reading. It’s a habit that’s been engrained through years of unknowing practice, but it’s completely unnecessary and does nothing but slows down your reading. If you can stop saying the words in your head as you read them then that’s usually the hardest part - generally you have to force your brain to not have enough time to subvocalise by reading at a fast pace. There’s also a handy (and fun) website called Spreeder.com that will help you practice - just copy and paste the text you want into the box, click ‘play’, and it will display each word individually one after another on the screen, at a rate you choose. Generally 300 words per minute is a good start, and is just about the threshold speed where it gets hard to follow the text, and subvocalise at the same time. So if you try it you’ll probably stop saying the words in your head, as you just don’t have time to.
- Read in Chunks - Rather than reading one word at a time, try looking at a chunk of three or four words - you’ll find with a bit of practice your brain will be able to process the information from larger and larger chunks of text, without having to read each word individualls.
- Don’t Backtrack - When you’re reading fast, it’s tempting to restart sentences again as you feel like you’ve missed a few points. If you practice not going back when you feel like it, then you should start to concentrate more to ensure you get it first time round, and this will help increase the speed of your reading.
As with most things, practice makes perfect, but you will probably find that you can dramatically increase your speed of reading in quite a short amount of time. When practiced a few times it will really help to increase your reading productivity. What’s more, there’s no need to pay hundreds of dollars on a speedreading course, when you’ve got plenty of free material to practice with on the internet! Obviously if you’re reading a heavy text such as a textbook or research article, you’ll probably have to slow down your speed of reading, as they don’t seem to be designed for easy comprehension! Good luck and feel free to submit any comments at the bottom of this page.
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