1, 2, 3 – Improve Your Reading Speed

Do you read a lot? I suppose: Yes. Although or better inspire of living in 21st century, we are addicted to the Internet. We read our e-mails, newsletters, blogs and naturally all the information that serves for being up to date with our job, hobby or whatever. Perhaps we have a special interest so we also need to read books and last but not least the daily newspaper.

Taking all this together, it remains little time for doing something else. This is my experience and I don’t believe to be alone with it. So when we cannot eliminate what we have to read, we have to change our reading speed.

You may ask now: How can I do this? My experience taught me, reading faster is not so difficult. But let me explain what normally happens while reading: we’ve learned at school to take the words in a linear manor. We read a sentence word by word. What happens: we get all information – important or less – word after word. But do we really need every word to understand our sentence, the meaning of our text?

Let me give you an example, take the question: “What is the aim of language learning?” But we also could ask: “Aim of language learning?” Here you see, that there are some words, which aren’t essentially for understanding the context. The first example needed 7, the second only 4 words and we got the main idea of the text.

So, when we now instead of reading word by word, fly with our eyes over the text and grasp only the meaningful words, we became a lot quicker, our reading speed increases. It is not important to understand every single word, or hesitate when a word seems strange to us. As long as we understand the main message of the text it is absolutely all right. We get a picture of the context, what we can memorize.

With this different approach to a written text we also change our mindset. We have to leave old paths and discover, learn a new, different way of reading. May be it will take some time. Important is to start and try to see a text with ‘different’ eyes. You’ll be surprised by the result. So at this point I can only say: Happy Speed Reading.

The author is a passionate reader in different languages and always interested in items which makes live easier. Self development is a never ending project for him. His daily motivational and inspirational attitude is a result of his own experiences.

Tagged as: word after word