One of the best, and easiest, ways to improve your vocabulary is by becoming an insatiable reader. The best thing about using reading to expand your vocabulary is that it works both ways: by developing a more extensive vocabulary, you’ll improve your ability to read quickly and with better comprehension, because you’ll know the words you’re reading and won’t have to either guess at meanings or stop to look things up. For example, did you know the exact definition of the word insatiable in the first sentence above, or did you skim over it and infer its meaning through context? While that’s a valid way to handle unknown or unfamiliar words, you’re running the risk of misunderstanding key points in the text if you always have to guess at meanings.

Reading introduces you to new words, and your vocabulary study techniques allow you to build on those words so you’re learning groups of them at one time. Take the word insatiable, and apply some of the study tips to it that we’ve discussed in previous posts on this site. A good place to start is with the word’s etymology, so you can find out more about the word. If you look up the roots of this word, you’ll see that it comes from the Latin root satiare (“to fill full”) with the prefix in- (“not”). Without even looking up the dictionary definition, you can put those two root words together to get the meaning “not filled full” – that is, not satisfied. “Insatiable” (pronounced ihn-SAY-shuh-bull) is an adjective usually paired with the words “hunger” or “desire” and used to describe the feeling of never having enough. If you’re an insatiable reader, it means you’re never tired of reading, and perhaps would rather be reading than doing anything else.

When you’re looking at the root word satiare you’ll probably notice that another word shares that root, the verb satiate (“to satisfy, to fill to completeness”). If you pair those words together in your mind, you’ll be able to learn them both – and you can add even more words to the group by including the related words satiation (noun: the state of being completely filled or satisfied) and satiated (adjective: completely satisfied, usually referring to being full of food).

To increase your exposure to as many words as possible, pick from a variety of sources and topics. Keep a notepad handy to jot down words you’re not sure of so you can look them up later and practice them. As your vocabulary and reading skills improve, you’re sure to be satisfied with your progress and achievements.

Cross-posted at The Vocabulary Builder’s Blog.

Many people are told that the first thing they need to do in order to increase reading speed is to focus on the number of words per minute they’re able to scan, and learn the ways to make that number higher. While it’s true that there are valuable techniques that you can learn to widen your focus, train your eyes to group words, and teach your mind to target key words (all of which will raise your overall speed), if you’re ignoring comprehension, then you’re not really speed reading. After all, anyone can quickly scan through a few pages or chapters of a book, moving their eyes down the page and flipping those pages over, but if they get to the end of the text and have no idea what they’ve read, it’s just a show. Rather than making speed your primary focus, we recommend that you keep comprehension at the core of your speed reading practice.

That having been said, there are different levels of comprehension, and that’s something you also need to keep in mind. For example, if you’re an employee who has been given the task of reading a departmental procedure guide in order to do a new job, you’ll want to make sure you read it slowly enough that you get all of the details, so that you can do your job correctly. On the other hand, if you’re the head of the department and you’re reviewing the procedure guide for accuracy, a quick skim through will likely give you all the information you need about whether the author included the necessary steps. Obviously, as the employee in this example, you’re responsible for understanding and remembering the full text, as well as being able to apply what you’ve learned to your job. As the department head, you should be able to trust the author to have included all the details (which you would already know, we hope) and therefore would only have to scan for key words, headings, and categories to make sure they had covered all of the aspects of the procedure.

In other words, you need to think about why you’re reading something before you start to read it, and that will help you determine the appropriate reading speed to use. Think about questions you have that you’d expect the text to answer, and keep those in mind as you read. Don’t worry about your speed, but concentrate on comprehension instead. You’ll find that as you get more efficient as a reader, and better able to judge the rate you need as well as the answers you’re looking for, your speed will naturally increase.

Habits are relatively easy to develop, but often hard to break. The hardest habits to change are ones you don’t even know you have. One of the first steps in becoming a speed reader is identifying your bad habits and learning to overcome them. What you might not realize is that you probably have good reading habits, too, and you can benefit from focusing on these and using them to their fullest extent. Here are the 7 good reading strategies that you should encourage (or develop, if you’re not already following them):

Read phrases, not words. Good speed readers know how to “clump” words together into phrases, and have trained their eyes to take in the entire phrase, rather than reading each word one by one.

Improve your vocabulary. A successful speed reader has achieved this success in part due to their strong and expansive vocabulary. It’s just common sense: the more words you know, the faster you’ll read, because you won’t have to keep stopping to look things up, or going back to clear up confusion after you’ve misunderstood a passage.

Explore new materials. When you read a variety of materials (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, blogs) on topics that interest you, and also topics that are new to you, you’ll maximize your opportunities to learn new words. What’s more, you’ll become familiar with different styles of writing. This will speed up your overall reading time because you’ll be able to anticipate where you’re likely to find information, and how it will be formatted in the text.

Focus on comprehension. Many people new to speed reading think that speed is everything, but without comprehension, speed is useless. If you go so fast through the text that you don’t understand or remember what you’ve read, you’ll have to re-read it. Make sure that you’re reading at a pace that’s just slow enough for good comprehension.

Focus on concentration. A large part of comprehension comes from your mental focus. If you’re distracted, you’ll find it almost impossible to absorb the material you’re reading, and definitely impossible to remember it later. If there’s something you need to read, set aside time in a quiet place and concentrate on it.

Keep practicing. When you first learned to read as a child, it took constant practice before you could read with ease. Now that you’re an adult, you should devote the same effort to learn to read with speed.

Enjoy the process. As you increase reading speed, you’ll gain confidence in your abilities, and that will provide the motivation you need to keep reading and practicing. After all, the better you are at anything, the more you’ll enjoy doing it. Learn to enjoy reading, and you’ll easily improve your reading speed.

The word multitasking is familiar to anyone who’s hooked up to the 21st-century whirl of technology we call “daily life” these days. You eat your breakfast while listening to the morning news and answering e-mail; you listen to a co-worker on the phone while you’re skimming through the department meeting outline your boss just handed you and mentally planning the presentation you’re going to give. While it might seem like you’re being efficient, you might in truth be slowing yourself down.

Studies have shown that if you’re focused on one task and finish it before moving on to the next one, you actually end up going faster overall through the entire set of tasks, because you don’t have to go back and fix things you forgot. When you’re paying attention, you won’t have to reread text, or ask someone to repeat something. Obviously, if you don’t have to go back and read material again, you’re saving time, no matter how quickly you read it in the first place.

You can also save time by focusing on two questions before you begin: why are you going to read this text, and what will you do with the information? If the answer to these questions is “I’m not sure” then do you really need to read it? Save your time, energy, and concentration for the materials you really need to go over.

Keep your focus steady while you’re reading, and do your best to not think about unrelated things (doctor’s appointments, dinner plans, etc.). Any extraneous information in your mind will interfere with your comprehension and retention of the text you’re reading. On the other hand, thinking about related things in your experience helps retention. For example, if you’re reading an article on cooking while thinking about making those dishes for dinner, your visualization will add to your ability to recall the facts, ideas, or even an entire recipe. You won’t have to go back to refer to the information later.

To sum it up, speed reading isn’t just about your reading speed – it’s about the time you save by keeping focused and not having to go back to read something again.

People often think that speed reading is simply the ability to move your eyes over as much text as possible in the shortest available time. It’s true that good speed readers can read hundreds of words per minute more than the average reader, but the thing that distinguishes them from the crowd is their ability to comprehend and remember what they’ve read. Reading through text without comprehension is a waste of your time. For this reason, if you’re thinking of signing up for a speed reading course or purchasing speed reading software, make sure they promise both improved comprehension as well as improved speed.

Text comprehension is a multifaceted process, and one that isn’t always taught in schools any more. Part of comprehension involves what’s often referred to as “critical thinking” – that is, the ability to question and analyze text as you read it. In order to do this, you need to be able to both retain that analytical viewpoint and efficiently process text. Learning speed reading techniques will help you do this.

At its most basic level, reading is simply the recognition that the letters on a page are arranged to make words, and those words form sentences. It’s possible to “read” text in a language you don’t know just by sounding out the words, even if you don’t know the meaning of them. Comprehension is what takes reading to a meaningful level.

Comprehension starts with knowing the meaning of individual words. Next, the reader needs to understand the meaning of the words once they are combined into phrases. Finally, the reader must be able to understand the overall ideas and concepts that the author is communicating by using those phrases. Comprehension at this level depends on vocabulary skills, the ability to use context clues to derive meaning, and on the reader’s overall knowledge. That’s why it’s so important to read as much as possible as part of your vocabulary studies, and to choose reading material from a variety of sources. The more you know, the faster you’ll be able to read, and you’ll improve your comprehension skills at the same time.

As we’ve discussed before, subvocalization is one of the bad habits that you need to eliminate in order to maximize your reading speed. The good news is that the faster you read, the easier it is to stop subvocalizing. That’s because when you’re subvocalizing, you’re “reading aloud” to yourself, even if only in your head. Most people have a standard speech rate of about 125 words per minute, but that’s very much slower than the standard reading rate of 250 words per minute – which is itself slow compared to the 600+ words per minute that speed readers achieve. When you read faster than you speak, it’s impossible for you to “sound out” individual words in your head. The harder it is for you to subvocalize, the faster you’ll read; the faster you read, the harder it becomes to subvocalize.

If you find that you’re still mentally sounding out words as you read, there might be some unconscious physical movements you’re making that are contributing to this tendency. To find out, record yourself reading with your cell phone or computer-screen camera. Read silently for long enough that you lose any feeling of self-consciousness. When you’re finished, review the film and focus on your cheeks and lips in the recording. Do you see any muscles twitching as you read? That can be an indication that you’re so much in the habit of subvocalizing that your body automatically tries to match the physical motions of reading out loud. Once you identify this problem, you can focus on stopping it. After enough practice, your facial muscles will lose the habit of movement while reading, and you can devote your mental muscles to increasing your reading speed.

A large part of learning how to speed read is developing the ability to focus. There are two aspects of focusing in speed reading: the first is focusing your eyes (you need to learn to take in more than one word at a time), and the second is focusing your mind. And one of the biggest obstacles to focusing your mind is distraction. In order to increase reading speed, you’ll need to decrease the amount of distraction in your life.

Some distractions are present in your environment. If you’re sitting in a room with several other people who are talking to each other, or listening to music you can hear from their headphones, or even just turning over the pages of a book, the added sounds will make it hard to focus on what you’re reading. In addition, you’ll be tempted to look directly at movements that you see out of the corner of your eyes, which takes your focus from the page in front of you.

Even if you’re alone in a room, you might not be truly isolated if there are some of the electronic technological gadgets we enjoy these days in the room with you. If you’re sitting at your desk with your computer on, you’ll hear the pings and dings and other notification noises from your IM or e-mail – and you’ll have to avoid the temptation of getting on line and surfing instead of concentrating on the reading work you need to do. Your cell phone will ring, you’ll hear the buzz of an incoming fax, the television in the corner that you left on will flash colorful advertisements and distract you. Even the music you put on in the background will take up your brain’s time and energy, though you might not consciously realize it.

There are physical and mental distractions to deal with as well. If your chair is uncomfortable, part of your attention will be focused on that – again, probably unconsciously, at least at first. On the other hand, if you’re a little too comfortable, you might start dozing. If you’re tired or hungry, your body will not cooperate and your brain won’t have the energy to effectively process the information. Your mind will also wander if you’re thinking or worrying about something else, instead of thinking about what you’re reading and what you want to get out of the material.

To solve the problem of distraction, do your important reading and your speed-reading practice in a quiet place where you can be alone. Turn off all of the electronic devices around you, and close the windows and curtains if necessary to eliminate noise and visual clutter from the outside. Get rid of the clutter inside your brain as well by setting aside all of the other things on your mind. It will help if you write down everything you’re thinking about on a piece of paper and set it aside; this physical action will prompt you to mentally set those things aside as well.

Make sure you’re not hungry or thirsty, and that you’ve had enough sleep. Keep your body and mind relaxed by taking regular breaks to rest your eyes and mind. Focusing on anything is work, and you need to stop to rest before you continue with that work. By getting up and stretching or taking a quick walk around the block, you’ll get your blood moving and that will send oxygen to your brain. Try to rest, stretch, and get a drink of water or a bite to eat for five minutes out of every half hour, and you’ll find that the time you do spend focusing on your reading will bring the results you want.