Speed Reading Tactics How Do You Read Super Fast and Comprehend

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Speed Reading Tactics How Do You Read Super Fast and Comprehend

The most often question I get asked is, "How can I read over 1500 words per minute and still understand, or comprehend the material?" Stated in another form, "Does speed reading really work?" Without writing an entire course, this article will try to answer these questions.

When people question about reading fast and not comprehending, there is a basic misunderstanding of terms. As I've written in previous articles, reading is the mind's response to print. If your mind is not responding when you are applying any speed reading technique, then you are in fact not reading. The word reading, then, always assumes some level of comprehension.

If you have been exposed to some program that teaches you how to move through materials at very high rates in the thousands of words per minute range and you are not comprehending, then the program has failed you. Recently I got an email from someone who told me they had been working with a computerized program and that they had increased their speed to over 2000 words per minute but were not comprehending much and asked if I could help. This was an excellent example of bad, misguided training.

There are two primary aspects of "speed reading." The first is improving the mechanical aspect of reading. That happens with some sort of eye movement techniques. In fact, it is possible to physically move the eyes and see all the words in the material at rates of 10,000 - 100,000 words per minute. Naturally a speed reading program will contain this aspect. But unfortunately, this is about all that is trained, leaving the user frustrated as I so often hear.

The second aspect of speed reading is comprehension. Comprehension is the mind's response to the symbols on the page. In effect, then, reading is thinking. You can read as fast as your mind can respond to the print. So, to truly speed read, you need to learn how to move your mind faster as well.

To answer the question, Does speed reading really work," I say no! You work it! That means there are ways to train your brain to respond differently as you accelerate your speeds. What I have found to work best is to teach learners the mechanics first with some level of comprehension, but letting them relax and not worry about getting(memorizing) as they go thru this initial skill building stage.

After the learner is more comfortable with the physical/mechanical skills, then we build comprehension in a purposeful manner. When the learner has broken out of the old habits they have accumulated in the past, then they are taught how to monitor what the mind is doing as they don't have to think so much about the eye mechanics.

One of the keys to comprehension is preparing the mind for reading. There are a wide assortment of tools to help this phase of training. The comprehension approach breaks the learner out from the traditional left brain approach they learned in early life and engage the whole brain. Or, in other words they learn how to activate the right hemisphere as well. One way of helping to do this is looking thru the material in a manner that gives you the "30,000 foot view" instead of the word-by-word view you were taught when first learning to read.

From that "high" view, you then learn to navigate at various levels depending on you needs and purposes. But remember, comprehension is you. It's your mind's response to print. As your eyes are moving through the material, ask yourself, "what am I thinking about?" If it has nothing to do with the print, you are not reading. You're doing something else, possibly daydreaming, or criticizing yourself. Bring it back to the print. Again, speed reading does not work. You work it! Learn how to build better comprehension. Monitor what your mind is thinking about.

Speed Reading Tactics Avoid These 8 Fatal Mistakes

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Speed Reading Tactics Avoid These 8 Fatal Mistakes

Speed reading is a set of skills that is necessary for nearly everyone's survival in this age of information overload. Whether you are a student, returning adult student, employee, manager, executive, or business person reading more efficiently and effectively is set of techniques that are key to your survival. Here are 8 fatal mistakes you need to avoid when learning this set of powerful learning tools and how you can overcome them.

1. Too much focus on speed. All speed reading programs and approaches want you to focus on speeding things up. In the beginning stages of your skill development this obviously is essential. However, when you want to understand what you are reading, you can only read as fast as your mind can understand the material. Learn to distinguish between practicing the skills and applying them in the real world.

2. Focusing on the mechanics only. The eyes are the mechanical tools allowing you to read, but the brain/mind interprets and comprehends the material. Too many programs focus either exclusively or primarily on eye-span training and assume that the cognitive or comprehension process will eventually catch up. Beware of investing your time and money on these types of programs. There needs to be a clear path to the comprehension side of speed reading.

3. Holding back. In order to master speed reading you have to learn to think and perceive the print in new ways. Too often a beginner holds back because the mind gets so overloaded with this new perceptual process. A new learner may increase their reading speed by 100 words per minute or so, but won't let go in the speed development portion because comprehension suffers initially. This type of new learner wants to comprehend in the same manner he/she has always done it. Real speed reading does not speed up what you already do. It transforms how you process information and print.

4. Inconsistent effort. Learning to master speed reading as a lifelong skill is an easily learnable, but very complex set of behaviors. Very often the learner will be very excited at the outset. Then life happens. Other priorities take over. The great psychologist William James said that in order to change our habits, we must commit to the change, and allow no exceptions until the new skill is firmly embedded in our nature (becomes habit). You will not master speed reading by training a little one day and then not practicing again for a week or two. To move from new skill to mastery means consistently working with the skills over a period of time.

When was the last time you tried to change a habit? Were you successful? Did you do it overnight? Or, did you have to remind yourself over and over until the new skill became a habit?

Beware of what the sales page tells you about learning to speed read 16 minutes. You may be able to learn about it. You won't be able to master it. The key question for you is: is it worth devoting a little time consistently over what most behavioral psychologist will agree takes 30 -45 days to change your old habits into new ones?

5. Giving up too early. We live in a culture of instant gratitude. It seems almost everything is instantaneous. Unfortunately you have lifelong reading habits that won't change overnight. Jumping to conclusions too early and stopping your training because "it doesn't work" will just keep you where you already are. I'm often asked, "Does that speed reading stuff really work?" My flip answer is "no." "It" doesn't work. You work it! Effective speed reading is a systematic approach to dealing with print. First you learn the system. Then you apply the system. If you relate to this flaw, you need to enroll in a program that has personalized one-to-one support for the times when you feel like giving up.

6. "Reading" mindlessly. Once again, it is important to get the eyes moving efficiently, but you have to remember that behind the eyes should be your mind. What is your mind doing as your eyes are moving? Learn to activate and move your mind with your eyes. With proper training you can learn to move your mind faster as well. This is a comprehension issue.

7. Expecting that you should understand it completely after one try. Reading comprehension, or understanding the material, is not a one time event. For very simple things one exposure may be enough. However for larger documents, books, manuals, etc. that need to be fully understood and retained, thinking you should master it in one sweep is a myth. In fact comprehension is a process. A process is a systematic approach to accomplish a result. Learn how to build comprehension. Learn and apply the process.

8. The need to be perfect. If you are someone with a low frustration tolerance, you will never master speed reading. Perfection is an ideal state. As an ideal state, it is questionable as to whether it can ever be achieved in reality. We can strive for perfection and get closer and closer. Learning is a messy process. Rarely do we get it the first time around. Learning to speed read is the same. As with all learning, we learn a lot about ourselves in the process. Looking back at challenging things we have mastered, we discover the journey was not a straight perfect path. For those of us who love to learn, the journey was full of personal growth and now looking back worth the ride.

If you want to master speed reading skills, commit to the process, get a good teacher/coach to help you through the tough times, and keep these fatal mistakes in mind. You'll discover more than how to speed read. You'll unlock secrets of your mind you didn't even know existed.

Speed Reading Tactics 9 Tips to Keep Your Mind Focused While Learning to Speed Read

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Speed Reading Tactics 9 Tips to Keep Your Mind Focused While Learning to Speed Read

In the "always-on" electronic information rich and interconnected culture we live in, challenges to our ability to focus and concentrate is an extremely essential trait that few people can claim is not a problem. Concentration becomes even more difficult when learning to speed read. This article will outline 9 tactics you can easily apply while you learn to speed read and they will pay dividends beyond the process of reading.

When learning to speed read, one of the tough habits to overcome is mind-wandering. Slow readers are often crippled in their ability to comprehend, or understand the material in front of them. Other inefficient habits like focusing on individual words, makes it harder to grasp the larger meaning. Even readers who comprehend well face challenges of mind wandering when they first learn speed reading skills because they are focusing on how the eyes are moving. However, without the focus on meanings, comprehension will always remain elusive.

Here's what to do differently:

1. Get plenty of rest. Without enough sleep, the brain goes into overload more easily. Trying to learn these perceptually challenging skills when fatigued will be a waste of time.

2. Use proper fuel. Your brain needs certain nutrients in order to create the biochemistry needed for learning. Loading up on sugar and caffeine as well as ingesting large amounts of fats and empty calories from processed foods starves your brain of necessary nutrients.

3. Prepare your mind for practice. Practice means doing essential exercises that are designed to train your brain for higher performance. Before you start your practice sessions, take a few moments to quiet your mind. There are many different ways to do this. One simple way is to shut your eyes and merely watch your breathing pattern for a minute or two until your breathing slows down and deepens into your diaphragm.

4. Prepare for the material. Look through the material quickly to get a basic outline of what it covers.

5. Ask questions based on what you observe in number four.

6. Be purposeful. Know what you want to get out of the material and how much comprehension is needed for the results of the practice session.

7. Ask yourself continuously. "What's this about?" over each paragraph. Force your mind to respond to something you see.

8. Stop and Note every few minutes at least what the most important points were that you discovered along the way.

9. Practice Focusing Techniques. There are numerous techniques that can help you build your focus. Simply watching a candle, or light and noting how long it takes to observe your mind going somewhere else is one of the simplest techniques that you can do. Track how long it takes your mind to wander off and then try to make it longer each time.

Now that you have these nine tactics, apply them whenever you read, not only while learning to speed read. I'd also like to invite you to learn more at Get Free Tips

Speed Reading Tactics 7 Tips For Overcoming Sub-Vocalization

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Speed Reading Tactics 7 Tips For Overcoming Sub-Vocalization

A recent visitor to my site inquiring about speed reading asked, "How can I move away from actually saying the words, and learn how to identify the symbols?" The question demonstrates a knowledge of one of the difficult habits to overcome in learning to speed read - sub-vocalization. Sub-vocalization is seeing the words, then saying the words in your mind, then hearing the words, and finally understanding them. It is a four step process. Reading is defined as getting meaning from printed materials - seeing them, and creating understanding. Theoretically, reading should be only two steps. This article will give 7 tips to overcome and transform this process.

Sub-vocalization is heralded by most uninformed pundits as the primary block to slow reading. It is a difficult habit to overcome. Too often speed reading learners get too hung up in the beginning because they become so focused on this habit. It is a problem for speed reading depending on how you define speed reading. If someone currently reads at 250 wpm (words per minute), and then learns to read at 500 wpm, is that speed reading? If so, that is still a speed in which the spoken word can still be understood, but it is below the visual reading threshold which occurs at about 600 wpm. From my experience of using and training tens of thousands of learners, speed
reading occurs much faster than that.

Tip One - Get physical - learn to move the eyes more rapidly and fluidly over the print. All speed reading programs cover some sort of physical eye training. Unfortunately, most programs stop with the physical training, and that is one reason why speed reading programs often get negative reviews. Keep in mind the eyes are the mechanics in reading. Learning to move the eyes more fluidly and getting them unstuck from focusing on single words and phrases is very important to getting the mind to respond faster. You do need to see the words faster. But in the early stages, this can be unsettling. Know that you are making dramatic changes to your perceptual processing of
the material and stay focused and disciplined.

Tip Two: Since sub-vocalization occurs below 600 wpm, increase your rates far beyond that. In fact, you should consistently move at least twice that speed. Breaking sub-vocalization by fast practice is useful in stimulating the brain's nervous system in a way that is similar to driving a car. You might feel comfortable driving at 30 miles per hour.
Then you drive on the freeway. As you accelerate, you focus on controlling the car as you ramp up to 70 mph. After a couple hours you exit the freeway and slow back down 30 mph. It feels very, very slow. Training your eyes and brain to focus and understand at accelerated rates follows a similar principle.

Tip Three: Think about what you are seeing. After all, reading is a thinking skill. As your eyes are passing over all the words, think about what the material is about. Do not focus on saying to yourself, "Stop Sub-vocalizing!" Paying attention to your sub-vocalization and telling yourself to stop only interferes with any comprehension. Your mind will be thinking about the sub-vocalization, not the material.

Tip Four: Use multiple rapid exposures to the material. The brain has an incredible capacity to recognize patterns and relationships of visual symbols at extremely high rates. Seeing something very fast more than once leads to recognition and then comprehension.

Tip Five: Ask questions of the material as you pass over it. Questions have a powerful impact on the mind. Questions seek answers. Allow your mind to start stringing things together. Use any clues you get to start forming a mental picture of the material.

Tip Six: Monitor your thinking. If your mind is not responding to the material below, or in front of your eyes, notice what you are thinking about, and then bring it back to the material. Constantly ask yourself, "What is this about?" When you speed up the eyes moving over the material, the mind will naturally become more engaged until you get to an overload point. When that happens, combine the above tips. The experienced speed reader can read in almost any environment with precision concentration. He/she has full control of the mind's focus.

Tip Seven: Practice, practice, and practice some more. Overcoming sub-vocalization is a tough habit to beat. Your old ways will easily slip back until you remind yourself to behave in new ways. Don't "practice" in materials that are important for you fully understand and retain. Comprehension and retention are a separate part of the process. Use materials that are interesting to you, but you don't need to master. You can work on comprehension and recall after you've reached a level of some comfort with the basic mechanics.

Overcoming sub-vocalization is only part of the process. There are other strategies and tactics in learning speed reading, such as the comprehension process and building memory and recall. All the above tips should be done together. However, the goal of overcoming sub-vocalization is not to quiet the mind. You do not want your mind to go to sleep. You want to replace sub-vocalization with your mind's response to the print. A skilled speed reader's mind is very active. It's not sounding out the words verbatim in the order of the printed sentence, but rather, you are summarizing as you go.

Speed Reading is All in Your Mind! Really!

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Speed Reading is All in Your Mind! Really!

Is speed reading a myth, or a method? Searching through the web for information on speed reading can lead to mass confusion, especially if you read the majority of posted views on non-commercial sites. The verdict from reviewing these personal experiences can cause an interested learner to have great doubts about the claims we see on the commercial sites. Why is there such great debate?

The reasons why there is great debate about the effectiveness of speed reading training are varied. They include: poorly designed training, misinformation based on outdated techniques that are packaged from public domain sources, lack of knowledge about the nature of reading from sellers who may have succeeded in learning the skills themselves, and a general misunderstanding about comprehension from both the providers of speed reading and the students of speed reading.

Without comprehension, you can not read. You may move your eyes through the material rapidly, but if you don't understand the material, then it has been a waste of time. That statement is true, unless it is part of a training technique that is part of a larger training process.

Most speed reading programs do not teach the comprehension process effectively. Many do not even address it and the entire program is about moving the eyes faster. These programs leave the learner with the assumption that with enough repetition comprehension will come along on its own. This is false. This creates disgruntled learners.

There are two components of reading whether you read fast or not. The first component is mechanical. Your eyes are the mechanical aspect of reading. Because of your old habits, if you read less than 600 words per minute (wpm), you are probably doing this inefficiently and you can benefit somewhat from training on this. The second component to reading is comprehension, or the cognitive aspect.

In learning to speed read, developing the cognitive aspect, or comprehension, is the bigger challenge. In fact, it is the reason why disgruntled speed reading trainees have negative views about the skill. If the training did not include an in-depth approach to comprehending then the criticism is well placed.

On the other hand, there is an important side to this debate that does fall on the shoulders of the learner. If comprehension is your mind's understanding of the text, then you have to learn how to drive your mind faster as you learn to move your eyes faster as well. Retraining your mind is much more difficult than training your eyes.

It doesn't happen by magic. Thus speed reading is actually all in your mind. Not only do you have to move your eyes faster, but you need to train your mind to think and perceive in faster and new ways.

Learning to perceive in new ways is a tricky path to navigate. The mind wants to resist this because it has been successful in keeping you "safe" as you are now. In other words, we get trapped in our habits. Change represents a threat. The mind protects you from the threat. Resistance is a natural response of the mind.

The key to successfully learning to speed read is not merely moving the eyes through print rapidly. The key to speed reading success is to use your mind in new ways as well. When you succeed at this transition, it is amazing how it affects all other aspects of your thinking and learning. It is not an easy transition, but is well worth the effort.

And now that you have learned perhaps one of the most critical aspects of mastering speed reading, I'd like to invite you to continue your learning with more free insightful tips at http://www.speedreadingtactics.com/speed_reading_newsletter.html.

Speed Reading Has No Use Without Comprehension

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Speed Reading Has No Use Without Comprehension

Speed reading is a skill that is frequently overlooked. This skill is one that can help any range of people including students, proofreaders, and corporate executives. There is a proven correlation between increasing the rate of which you read to the rate of comprehension. Which means the faster you can read the more you comprehend the material and the slower your read the more you can suffer from lack of comprehension.

After reading a large book or block of text most people feel a sense of accomplishment and so you should but the level of comprehension is the real triumph. Since comprehension is what makes the materials you just read useful such as when a student takes the SAT exam or an employee is trying to run a new piece of equipment after just reading the manual it's the the material you comprehended and can recall that makes the materials worth reading.

If while training to read quicker the importance of comprehension is ignored then the final outcome of the training will be tainted.

A person with good comprehension skills are able to figure out a block of text and then recall the most important pieces of information. The fact is that the rate of which you can read doesn't have anything to do with what you retain. Many software and other programs will tell you the complete opposite. They insist that the faster you read the material the more increased your level of comprehension.

To make a fair attempt to achieve both speed and comprehension, then it's crucial to make sure you don't get lost in focusing on specific points in every block of text that you read. Doing this will only decrease your rate of which you read. On the other hand if you focus too much on "good" comprehension it will have the same affect.

Many try to achieve a faster rate of reading and a good level of comprehension, however due to an increase amount of stress their efforts go unrewarded. So it is important to keep in mind that when it comes to speed reading and higher levels of comprehension, relaxation is the key.

A good way to approach speed reading and comprehension exercises is to give attention to the function of reading and the effortless extraction of information. In the end, you will find that the brain will deliberately acquire the right information as you continue to practice speed reading. It is also suggested to read freely, as you will experience final results in comprehension and speed reading that are quite welcomed.

One of the first rules of speed reading that many programs will emphasize is to stop rereading material, as it only weakens the ability to fully comprehend. The overall journey of speed reading helps to improve the skill of comprehension because the mind becomes better able to search for the information in text that matters. Training the mind to read at a faster rate will aid in the sharpening of comprehension skills when an effective balance is achieved.

Overall, investing in a good speed reading program allows the brain to participate in a fulfilling mental activity. Everyday practice is important, as it ensures the skill does not go to waste.

Speed Reading Does Not Work!

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Speed Reading Does Not Work!

Does speed reading really work? No, it does not work! You work it. Now before you stop reading thinking, "that last statement is obvious," I'll ask you to stop and think for a moment. Most people think that reading is a passive activity. Passive readers are slow readers who often have great difficulty with reading comprehension. Highly effective readers on the other hand show great activity in several areas of the brain while reading under brain scanning machines.

Most people take reading for granted. Most people have not learned how to activate their brain to read well, not to mention to read quickly. The notion that reading is a passive activity is at the root this most commonly asked question - "Does speed reading work?"

Here are the most common steps to developing yourself as a speed reader:

1. Increase the efficiency of your eye movements. All speed reading programs aim to do this. However, most approaches do this in an unnatural manner. Ineffective programs focus on increasing eye span (the size of the area for each eye stop) from one word to several words across the line. The common approach is to extend the eye fixation horizontally or linearly across the line, usually referred to as "word clumps." Eye movement efficiency is essential, but the natural sight experience is dimensionally vertical as well as horizontal, extending about 1-3 inches in diameter. Rather than focus on the size of the word clump, effective speed readers focus on meaningful groups of words that the eyes see in a dimensional manner. Remember, the eyes are merely the mechanics. Most speed reading programs devote most of the training to the mechanics and little to comprehension.

2. Shift your perception of comprehension. Comprehension is understanding what you read while you are reading. To read in the thousands of words per minute range, requires a shift in your perception. Currently you understand the print as you take it in grammatical sequence. This approach has been the basis of your reading comprehension for your whole life. The new perceptual shift is to understand the meaning of the print without needing the grammatical sequence. Your eyes will see all the print, but not in grammatical order. Your brain can process the meaning without the grammatical sequence. There are times that you have already experienced this in non-reading situations, but you are currently not comfortable allowing your brain/mind to apply it to your reading. Mean know I what. That sentence is an example. At first you hesitate, but then your mind makes sense of it.

3. Pump it up! Speed reading training is similar to muscle training. It requires continuous conditioning exercises over time. As neuro-science has shown us over the past ten years, the brain is very elastic and pliable. It does and will improve with continuous exercise over time. Many brain trainers have documented amazing results when the participant diligently works with the brain "muscle" reconditioning. Any physical sport provides a useful analogy to training your brain to master speed reading. Are you willing to do the training for lasting results? Learning to speed read is like learning most any other skill. It does require repetitive practicing over some time.

4. Continuous Improvement. Once again the muscle training analogy is useful. Imagine that you trained yourself in a fitness program for a few months. You got to a level that you felt good and satisfied with your results. Then other things took central stage in your life and you stopped working out. Perhaps two months later (or even 2 weeks) you came back to your workout. You will find your muscles quickly lost the efficiency they had before the long break. However, the good news is that there is something called muscle memory. It won't be as hard. The same is true for speed reading. You must do continuous exercise and application to remain at the peak of your performance. Application on a regular basis is the path to long term mastery and effective habit creation.

Keeping these four steps in mind, you will effectively work the speed reading process. There is a "you" behind the techniques. That "you" is your brain/mind applying the techniques in order to stimulate and monitor your reading process. To succeed requires your minds attention and response. Again, speed reading does not work. You work it. As you learn to apply your mind consciously while using the techniques, you will become a speed reading master.

Now that you know this secret, I invite you to learn more with our free tips and ebook at http://speedreadingtactics.com/speed_reading_newsletter.html