Fly Higher

In the beginning, you read letter by letter, aggregating them to form words who's meaning you memorized. Then you began building your vocabulary, adding a word to it each time you could recognize a word, not by dissecting it into a sequence of letters, but by clumping the letters together into a meaningful structure. You probably stopped your reading development at this stage, thinking that was all you needed to learn to read well. You learned how to crawl and have settled for crawling through all of your books, when you could be experiencing the exhilaration of soaring.

Your focus was on individual letters, but moved higher until it was on individual words. It is time to start flying at higher and higher altitudes. Begin by reading in groups of two or three words. Visually focus on the middle of the word group, stretching your peripheral vision to grab the entire group. Train yourself to pick up more and more words per eye fixation and you will soon be reading in ideas.

Move Forward

If you want to read faster, you must give up the luxury of allowing yourself to frequently regress while reading. Regressing, in the context of reading, is the act of allowing your eyes to backtrack to what you just read. Regression is a crutch you have become dependent upon as a result of thinking it is inconsequential if your mind wanders while reading and causes you to glide over information-rich passages without even attempting to gather what is being said.

Think of reading a book as watching a movie in a theater; you better be paying attention because if you miss what a character says, you will be unable to rewind the movie. Your mind will stop wandering when you stop regressing, because you will focus very intently when you hold yourself to only one exposure of a particular passage (except for previewing and reviewing).

Kicking the Regression Habit with a Pacer:

The most effective way to kick the regression habit is to use a pen, notecard, cursor, or your finger as a pacer while reading. Using a pacer feels natural (try underlining the rest of this post with your finger) and will force you to become conscious of your regressions, providing you with the key to overcoming the regression habit.

There are numerous pacer techniques, which can viewed in an upcoming post titled "Pacer Techniques -- From Basic to Advanced," but you should begin with the basic underlining technique, which consists of simply underlining each line of text with your pacer's edge just above the reading surface at a smooth, consistent pace that is fast enough to provide an appropriate challenge.

Preview

When you preview your book, you gain a basic understanding of the book and how it is structured. The familiarity you gain from the preview process will significantly increase your reading speed. Previewing will also increase your reading endurance (the duration you are able to read without having to consciously force yourself to focus), because you will be building curiosity about the book's content.

Previewing Non-Fiction:

If you are just starting the book, read the cover, preface, and table of contents. For a particular chapter, skim the entire chapter, focusing on headings and topic sentences (usually the first sentence in a paragraph). While previewing, you want to become genuinely enthralled by the information residing in your book, but be careful to resist the urge to stop and read entire pages, because we want to bottle up that curiosity and use it to keep you focused. Finish your preview by reading the chapter summary. You should be cruising during the preview. It should never take longer than 5 minutes to preview a chapter.

Previewing Fiction:

When you preview fiction, read the cover and table of contents. Then, skim the entire book very quickly. Your goal is to rapidly identify the main characters and gain a basic understanding of the plot. You may skip previewing for fiction if you wish to completely avoid the possibility of spoiling any part of the story. However, doing so will result in a slower reading speed.

Set a Timer

When you set a timer for a reading session, you are ordering your brain to stay focused on reading your book for the set duration.

Setting a timer will:

1. Increase your reading speed -- There's a magic to an imminent deadline. Setting a timer will create a time pressure that will force you to focus on reading. This heightened focus will complement your tendency to work harder and faster while being timed and result in you cruising through your reading.
2. Provide a means for tracking progress -- By timing yourself, you will be able to calculate your reading speed. We recommend calculating and writing down your reading speed (words per minute, or WPM) at least once a week.
3. Help you schedule breaks -- Taking breaks to rehydrate and get your blood flowing will increase your reading endurance and effectiveness. We suggest reading in blocks of 30 minutes with 5 minute breaks.

Define Your Purpose

Why are you reading?

You want to get something out of what you read, but what is it? Take a proactive approach and clearly define your purpose for reading before you begin. Clarity is the key to having a strong purpose. Your chosen purpose will be prodded for weaknesses as you read, and if your purpose is porous with vagueness, wandering thoughts will break through your focus and cause you to falter in your reading.

You will enjoy the following benefits by having a strong, clear purpose for reading:

1. You will stay focused for longer durations and consequently complete your reading much faster.
2. Your comprehension will increase because you know what you information you desire and you will be actively searching for it.
3. You will be more enthralled with your reading because you will be conscious of how reading will further your larger goals.

Clear Your Mind

You read something because you want to acquire information about a particular topic. If you want to be efficient in this endeavor, your brain will need to flip to a clean page so it can write everything down.

To clear your mind, you must:

Remove distractions

Find a reading hideout where you will not experience frequent interruptions. Each time you are interrupted, it will take you a while to get back into the optimal state of mind necessary to read at exceedingly rapid rates. People are the number one cause of external reading interruptions. Consider breaking away from human contact while reading (no phone, facebook, etc.), unless you can find a reading partner who excels at keeping on task.

Still your mind

You need to stop your brain from thinking about anything besides digging information out of your book. Stop stressing about what so-and-so said or thinks about you, and stop worrying about whether or not you are going to get everything done that needs doing. Take a moment to still your mind using either the heartbeat method or the inner flame method, you will love the benefits.

Heartbeat -- Become very still. Take calm, deep breathes, and sense your heartbeat. Stay positive, it might take a while to feel your pulse the first few times, but it will become easier each time. Once you have become still enough physically and mentally, you will find that you have a blank slate with which to imprint the contents of your book.

Inner Flame -- Hold the image of a flame in darkness in your mind. Feed everything on your mind into that flame. Annoyed that someone was a jackass and cut you off driving? Feed that feeling into your flame. Continue feeding things to your flame until only the flame remains. Now you are ready to consume the contents of your book.

The Routine in a Nutshell

From now on, your reading routine will be the following:

1. Clear your mind
2. Define your purpose
3. Set a timer
4. Preview
5. Move forward
6. Fly higher
7. Accelerate to visual speed
8. Stay attentive
9. Schedule breaks
10. Review it or lose it

I will be clearly defining each of these steps in consecutive posts. After we have discussed our reading routine, we will go over reading workouts.

The Speed Reader's Hideout

You have been searching the web for free resources to learn how to read faster. Search no further.

This blog will aggregate the information available on speed reading and condense it into an easily digestible form.

In addition to my own articles on speed reading, you will be provided with links to free speed reading exercises and lessons.

Before you go any further, take a free reading speed and comprehension test here. Repeat the test at least 3 times and write down your average speed and comprehension. Now, calculate your effective reading rate by multiplying your speed, say 150 words per minute, by your comprehension , say 80% (0.8). The effective reading rate of this example would be 150 x 0.8 or 120 words per minute. Keep track of your effective reading rate and regularly update it by retesting. By doing so, you will be able to clearly see your progression.