How to read at the speed of thought

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Speed is not important, understanding is important. But who told you that quality and speed are antipodes? The fact is that if you focus only on pumping speed, it will grow, but understanding will remain at the same level. This is one of the secrets of speed reading - to work not only on speed, but also on the ability to understand what you read.

Peter Kump wrote the book "", which is called an innovative tutorial. The author defines reading as looking at the printed text and extracting from it a volume of information sufficient to achieve the goal. Accordingly, speed reading is the same, but with the maximum possible speed.

In this article, you will learn about six factors, considering which you can swallow books at breakneck speed.

1. Understanding your speed and intent to read faster

You must decide that you will read this text or this book quickly. And by the way, you yourself should understand what “fast” means to you. The normal reading speed of a person is 700–1,000 characters per minute. You can check your reading speed as follows.

Pick a nonfiction book you haven't read yet. Time it and read for three minutes. Mark the place where you finished reading. Now take out a blank sheet of paper and write down the numbers 1 to 20 on the left side of the paper. Write down the facts and ideas that you can remember. Record thoughts for 5-6 minutes, no more. Now calculate the speed. Determine the average number of characters per line and the number of lines read. Next, multiply the two numbers. This will give you the total number of characters you have read. Divide this number by three (minutes). The result is your reading speed.

Here's what the calculation might look like: 40 characters per line × 35 lines per page × 3 pages / 3 minutes = 1,400 characters per minute.

It is important to always remember that you are only competing with yourself. When mastering this skill, like most others, the only one with whom you should compare your results is yourself, because we all learn at different rates, each does it in his own way.

2. Fast recognition of signal words

The faster you can recognize different words, the higher your reading speed. When you look at a picture, you do not tell yourself what it is about. You just look at it and you understand. You see at the same time everything that is located in the picture.

Each text contains the so-called signal words that help the author and the reader to structure sentences. Even unconsciously, when you see certain words, you expect something new: either a plot twist, or a description - and, as it were, you prepare a “free space” in your head for this. A musician, playing from the notes, always looks a little further than the place he is currently playing. The same happens when recognizing signal words in the text.

• Time category: during, when, after, before, first, after that, last, soon, before, before.
• Addition: for example, in addition to this, moreover, moreover, in addition, moreover.
• Alternatives: however, nevertheless, on the other hand, the other way around.
• Conclusion: in a word, in this way, therefore, as you can see.

To quickly learn to recognize signal words, you can practice as follows. Collect all these words in a column, print out the sheet and quickly open and close each word with a card, trying to recognize and understand this word.

3. Launching the read accelerator

You may be surprised to learn that you have the most powerful reading acceleration tool out there. With it, you can read faster, more attentively, without pronunciation and regressions, and reduce eye strain.

This accelerator is your hand. Slide your index finger along each line. Note that the eyes follow the pointer, not the other way around. The movement of the hand should be very fast so that the eyes can barely keep up with the meaning of the reading. At this speed, it is physically impossible to pronounce words.

In the first stage, you train speed, in the second, you check the quality. If you can't remember anything at all, just slow down and increase it gradually. Practice using your booster every day for 20-30 minutes.

If you want to read at a certain speed, for example 3,000 or 5,000 characters per minute, then you need to train the speed, approximately three times faster. There is a very simple exercise that will help you experience a threefold increase in your reading speed. Read the book for three minutes, mark the beginning and end. Read the same passage in two minutes. And in the last step of the exercise, read the same passage in a minute. Each time, note some new facts that you missed before. Most importantly, at each step, use your index finger to set the speed. After you practice a few times, your brain will get used to these speeds and your normal reading speed will increase significantly.

4. Ability to determine the topic of the paragraph

Paragraphs are structural units of text. All phrases in one paragraph are united by one topic. Anyone who has decided to learn speed reading in order to improve the quality of assimilation of information must quickly be able to determine the topic of the paragraph. As a rule, we do this without even thinking. It is important to train this skill in order to cope with any, even the most difficult texts.

You can train it as follows. Take the book. Read the paragraph and quickly identify the topic. See how many paragraph topics you can define in five minutes. After a little practice, you should do this at a rate of five paragraphs per minute.

5. Skill to cut off unnecessary

Probably, this is the most difficult thing in teaching speed reading - to skip information that is not of particular value.

Remember that when working with any text, it is important to start from the goal. Ruthlessly cut off what is not worth reading.

For example, you are reading Lifehacker. You choose an article. But how important is it? Is this a movie review article that you will forget about a few weeks later? Or a new technology that could make the lives of millions of people easier? Or is it about a new trend in fashion that will be out of date anyway? Are you reading the sports news page in the newspaper just to find out the results of the competition, or are you a Ph. D. and studying text about artificial intelligence? By asking yourself a simple question, "How important is what I read to me in the long run?"

The second question to ask yourself before and during reading is: what do you want to learn and remember? It only takes a few seconds to solve this for yourself, but the answers to these questions will determine your speed and attentiveness when reading the material. If we are talking about an article on a new technology or fashion trend, do you want to know about it only in general terms? Would you like to recall the highlights from the article later?

6. Tracking the storyline

Reproducing information is probably the most difficult comprehension test. This is one of the reasons why we use this test so often when developing reading comprehension skills. Since these two processes are closely related, often working on one of them automatically implies working on the other.

The Magic Line exercise will help you develop the habit of immediately recalling information after reading it. In fact, this is just a simple diagonal line, above which a word or phrase is written that reflects the topic of the text read.

As you read, draw a diagonal line on a blank piece of paper. After you finish reading, write the subject of the paragraph you read above this line. Do this without looking at the text.

Then you need to add details to your diagonal line - branches pointing upwards on either side of the line, as if it were a tree.

This skill can be developed very quickly, and the more you practice, the more you can remember whenever you need it.

Take a look at your bookshelves and bedside table. If they have accumulated too many magazines and books that you were going to read, but could not, then you do not need to torment yourself with a sense of guilt. Just a few weeks of studying the book "", and you can read everything that you have been putting off for so long.