1. Remove Distractions

Any distraction at all can reduce your reading speed as well as your reading comprehension. Worse, that distraction can get you thinking about other things, and your focus will quickly drift away from what you are reading, onto something irrelevant.

2. Give Yourself a Reason to Read, and Develop Genuine Interest

When you sit down to read something, you’ve obviously got a reason. Stick that reason firmly in your mind, and think of nothing other than the content of the book. You have to be interested and invested in what you’re reading. Otherwise, the reading itself will hold less value.

If you’re unable to develop a genuine interest in what you’re reading, you should take a break and try some other activity. This will prepare your mind to focus again on the text.

3. Rest Periodically.

Try stopping at the end of each chapter for a rest. Then, you get a chance to really think about the text, and maybe take some notes. When you come back to the text, you will be even more prepared than you would be if you had kept reading straight through.

Reading straight through a book does have the “benefit of the flow”, but some rest-time between sections will drastically improve comprehension. After all, the writer probably did not write the whole book in one sitting! A lot of time and research goes into writing books – you should treat them that way.

So remember: remove all distractions, give yourself a reason to read what you’re reading, and take breaks occasionally too. These 3 tips will drastically improve your concentration while reading.

Tips like these and many more can be found in the Speed Reading Manual. Learn how to speed read today!

This is why speed is just as important as comprehension. This fact is being acknowledged all over the world. What most people believe is that “the slower you read, the better you’ll understand the text.” This is in fact false. The truth is, when you learn a proper speed reading technique, your comprehension will improve along with your reading speed.

An average person can read about 250 words per minute, while a speed reading expert can read about 1000 words in the same amount of time. But that’s not what’s really important. The important thing is the comprehension level of each reader. The average person will have about 50%-60% comprehension while an expert can knock it up to about 85%. This is a phenomenal increase in comprehension.

So the next time you find yourself reading through the same passage for the fourth time in a row, remember that there is something you can do about it. Simply learn to speed read.

Whenever you’re learning something new, it’s important to first gauge what level you’re at. This is true in memory training, in musical training, in weight training, and in many other areas as well. Right now, you might think you’re a slow reader, but you won’t know just how slow you are until you take the test.

You should always find out where you are before you decide where you want to go.

So, it’s of course important to test your reading speed before you start your journey of improvement. This serves not only as a measuring tool, but as encouragement!

If you know your regular speed is 200 words per minute, think of how great it’s going to feel when you read 600 words per minute. Think of how right now, you’re used to your reading speed. You’ve adapted to it. Your lifestyle has shaped itself around your reading speed.

Once you start improving, you’ll find that you can read more and more stuff. You’ll start reading twice as much as usual. It’s going to feel great. You may even end up with hours and hours of free time in your day. You’ll be wondering “How did I stay so stressed out for so long? …and why did I put up with it?”

A reading speed test is very simple to design. If you want to set it up on your own, here’s what to do:

NECESSARY THINGS:

• Text you’ve never seen (1 or 2 pages)
• Working stopwatch
• Relaxed self

PREPARATION:

1. Get comfortable in your seat, holding the text on your lap. Don’t look at it yet!
2. Make sure the stopwatch is at 0.0

THE TEST:

Ready, set, go! Start the stopwatch and begin reading.

But it’s not really a race. You should read at your regular speed. Read like you always do. If you don’t read at a comfortable pace, you won’t pass the comprehension test anyway!

When you’re done reading, check how much time it took you. Then, count how many words there were in the text. (This is why it’s not good to read more than 2 pages…)

Reading speed is measured in words per minute (WPM). To get your WPM speed, divide the amount of words you read by the amount of time you spent.

If you spent 3 and a half minutes reading 2 pages, it might look like this:

886 words / 3.5 minutes = 253 words per minute

Once you do that, you have your WPM speed. But don’t get too excited yet, because you still need to do a comprehension test.

Hand the text over to someone you know (and trust!), and get them to quiz you on the content of the article. Or, you can just try explaining it out loud. If you can’t do this well, your comprehension level isn’t high enough. That means that the test over-stated your actual reading speed.

If you pass the test, then congratulations! You now have a measurement of your reading speed. That’s a big step towards improving your reading skills.

After all, if you don’t know how fast you’re reading right now, how do you know how much you can expect to improve? It could very well be that you’re in the position where you could quadruple your reading speed, instead of just doubling or tripling.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that kind of thing before you start? Then, after some training, you can test yourself again, and see how much you’ve improved.

Now, I realize this can be a little difficult (or at least time consuming) to set up for yourself. Nobody likes counting words, anyway! And, I can even hear many of you saying “But Stephen! I don’t have a stopwatch!”

That’s why there’s a Reading Speed Test on this website. The words are counted, the stopwatch can be started and stopped with buttons on the page, and the article is about speed reading, too!

Just press the Start button when you start reading, and press the Stop button when you’re done, and it will calculate your words per minute speed automatically. And, there’s a Comprehension Test already made too, so that you can make sure you understood the article.

And, also worth noting, there is some analysis of possible reasons for your current reading speed (depending on the WPM from the test), which is useful for pinpointing areas for improvement.

Do the Reading Speed Test now!

What’s really happening is this: when you read faster, information comes into your head faster. When more information is coming at you, it’s less likely you will become bored. The more interested you are, the more you will absorb. Thus, reading faster makes you comprehend more.

So the question is this: how can you speed read? How does speed reading work?

Speed reading has to do with eliminating sub-vocalisation. Sub-vocalisation is also known as “silent speech”. It can be defined as internal speech, which takes place during reading. Sub-vocalisation allows the reader to “hear” the words as they are being read. Removing this process allows for much faster reading.

Moving away from sub-vocalisation, makes room for a more visual approach to reading. When you read without sub-vocalising, you are no longer held by the 250 words-per-minute barrier set up by sub-vocalisation.

It is more efficient to perceive the words solely as visual information. The goal of speed reading is to control your use of auditory associations while taking in words.

Then you can start reading words not as a series of sounds, but as images. You already know most of the

words you will encounter while reading. It isn’t necessary to hear the words as well as see them; just by looking at the word, you can know what it means.

The concept is very simple, but the method is hard to master. Try reading the Speed Reading Manual, or the Speed Reading Newsletter. Both of those resources are available through this website. Check them out now!