There are two aspects to speed reading: the rate at which you read words, and your ability to process, understand, and remember what you read. Much of the advice you’ll get on speed reading is focused on the first aspect; however, the fastest reading speed in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t remember what you just read. Here are some tips to help you make the most of your skills in speed reading:

Mark your text with notes. Underline important words and concepts, and make notes and comments in the margins. Don’t go overboard thinking you have to underline everything – look for the key points in each section. Use a bookmark, turn down the page, or attach a sticky note to mark each page that you’ve written on. If you can’t make notes in the book, write your comments on the sticky notes themselves.

Collect your notes in one place. When you’ve gone through the book, get out a separate sheet of paper. Go back and start at the beginning of the book, flipping through to each page where you’ve made a note, and transferring the notes onto the sheet of paper. Add headings to separate the notes into logical sections according to the main ideas or topics. You can also use different colors of ink when writing things down to distinguish between different topics and categories of information. If ideas or questions occur to you as you’re doing this, write them down too. By writing things down in this fashion, you’re involving your body with physical action that will reinforce your mind’s mental activity.

Organize your notes in the best format. Once you’ve gone through the book and transferred your notes to the paper, re-read what you’ve written down and make any changes in the order or grouping of each item to make more sense, if necessary. Continue to add your own thoughts and to make links and connections between ideas and important themes. At this point, you should be developing a sense of how all of the information fits together.

Summarize your notes and ideas. Read through your reorganized notes and write a summary. By putting things in your own words, you’ll lock the ideas in your brain. If there is a summary of the book or text (done by an editor, reviewer, or the author themselves), how closely does your summary match? Did you identify the information you needed from the book, and do you understand it?

Your speed reading will help you get through the first and second steps of this process in the most efficient manner, but taking the time to organize and summarize what you’ve read will help you retain that information, so you won’t have to use your speed-reading skills to read it over again!

Click here for more help on improving your memory.

As we mentioned in the last post, you can increase your efficiency when you’re reading – and thereby increase your reading speed – if you take a minute to think about what you’re reading, why you’re reading it, who wrote it, and where in the text you’re likely to find the information you’re looking for. There are two well-known ways to structure your reading time in this fashion, making it easier for you to process and remember the data that you need while helping you skim over the nonessential paragraphs. Here’s a brief overview of the two techniques:

SQ3R
(Survey, Query, Read, Repeat, Review)

Survey. Like anyone setting out on a journey in an unfamiliar place, you’ll get the most out of your voyage through the text if you have a general idea of its “map.” Start out by reading the ancillary material first:
– the introduction to the book or article
– a general summary by the author or editor
– an abstract (found with scholarly or other journal articles)
– the table of contents
– the glossary at the end of the text
– any reviews of the text (check on line for these as well)

Query. Ask questions: What is the author’s goal? When was the text written? Who wrote it and who is cited? Why did you decide to read this? Where will the most important information be found in the text?

Read. Read the text, keeping those questions in mind, and following your mental “map” of the contents.

Repeat. After each block of text, repeat the main points as you understood them. Depending on what you’re reading, you may want to do this at the end of a paragraph, or a section of a chapter, or at the end of the chapter as a whole.

Review. After you finish reading, go back and review the main points. Did you find the information you need? Did you fully understand what you read? Are your questions answered?

PQRST
(Preview, Question, Read, Summarize, Test)

Preview. Look at all of the ancillary material, including any graphics, tables, and section headings in the material, before you start reading.

Question. Use the chapter and section headings you saw to come up with questions about the text. What questions do you have? What questions do you think the text will answer?

Read. Read the text, keeping those questions in mind.

Summarize. Restate the text in your own words, both at the end of major sections and at the end of the material.

Test. Test yourself on the information you gained from reading the test by answering the questions you started with.

It may seem counterintuitive to add extra time following these steps when your goal is to increase your reading speed, but by taking a few minutes to organize your mind before you start reading, you’ll more than make up the time by the improved efficiency of your reading and recall of the information you need.

When you improve your speed-reading skills, you become more efficient at reading larger amounts of text, because you’ve learned to eliminate the things that slow you down. Speed-reading practice will teach you to avoid backtracking, to widen your visual field to encompass more words at one time, and to get rid of bad habits like subvocalization.

Another way to improve your efficiency is to take a few moments to think about the reason that you’re reading something. Are you looking for a piece of specific information? Do you even know that what you’re looking for is in this piece of text – or at least that there is a good chance it is? You can streamline the information-gathering process and increase your reading speed by only reading the things that you need to read. Ask yourself why you’re about to read something before you start. Identify what you want to get from it, what questions you need to ask, and what answers you’re looking for. Is this something that will help you do your current job? Will it give you new information to advance your career? If someone else gave it to you to read, why?

Additionally, you need to be able to identify the information that is valuable in the things that you do read. When reading something for specific information, think about what you want to learn or find before you start reading. Get a list of key words and focus on them for a few minutes before starting to read. Your eyes will target those words when you’re reading, which will help you identify those passages that you need to read more carefully.

Think about these points before you begin reading, and you might find out that you don’t even need to start going through a specific piece of material, or that you can set it aside for when you have more time. Learn to prioritize your reading with this process, and you’ll be more efficient at work, and have more free time at home.

Comprehension in reading doesn’t necessarily mean remembering everything you read – just the most important things. Speed reading practice will teach you how to identify the vital information in a text, target the details you need to extract from that text, and focus on remembering those specific items. In order to do this, you need to do two things: first, learn to scan text for keywords and titles; and second, learn to analyze text as you scan it.

Note: These instructions are most useful for nonfiction reading where you have a specific goal, objective, or question. While you can scan through fiction or poetry, you might not enjoy the reading as much – and that’s what “reading for pleasure” is all about. However, if you need to do a book report, or write a summary, or merely get the general plot of a novel, scanning will help you get that quickly as well.

Scanning allows you to skim over a page of text while looking for the keywords that help you identify the information you need from it. If you’re looking for a particular piece of information or an answer to a question, you can look for words related to the question or the answer. For example, if you’ve been given several articles and journals on trends in computer systems development because your manager wants to get facts to back up a new IT development plan for off-site workers, you can scan those texts for terms like “network” and “teleconference” and “virtual desk.”

If you’re not looking for specific information, but need to get an overview of the text, you can focus your mind by asking yourself questions that you want the text to answer. If you have the question in mind, your eyes will automatically stop on the answers. Here are some questions to keep in mind:

Who is the author speaking to?
What is the main point of the text?
Why did the author choose the supporting points they did?
Where did the author source the references?
When was the text written, and have things changed since then?

When you are able to focus but not focus on a text – skimming for important points, keeping a global view of the text rather than reading word-for-word – you will be able to think about the text at the same time and begin to analyze it. At this level, you’re starting to synchronize your mind with the author’s and will be able to anticipate where they’re going with their points, which will help you read even faster.

When you’re first working on increasing your reading speed, you might think that you only have one goal: increasing the number of pages you read per minute. However, there’s more to that goal than you might think. If you have a mental image of the stereotypical “speed reader” it’s probably someone flipping pages so fast they’re almost a blur – zip zip zip zip and they’re done. Next book!

In reality, a good speed reader knows that reading speed needs to be adjusted depending on the material being covered, and by the reader’s goals for the information contained in that material. If you’re flipping through a magazine while waiting for an airplane, you’re not doing it because you have a need to remember the details of the recipes, gossip columns, or two-week-old news items in it – you’re probably killing time, letting your eyes wander while your ears listen for the flight announcement. It doesn’t matter if you only vaguely remember what you read when you get off the plane at your destination. On the other hand, if you’re using that airport time to study for the placement exam you’ll be taking two hours after your plane lands, you’ll need to read with the purpose of retaining the information contained in the text. There will be some times when you are flipping pages quickly, looking for specific headings or key words, and other times when you’re carefully reading a specific passage or two. There will be large segments of the text that you can skim through, mentally noting the content and overall structure of the information.

A good speed-reading course will focus on improving your ability to read efficiently, with good comprehension of the text, not on insisting that you learn to read X number of pages in Y minutes. Of course, by improving your efficiency, you’re also improving your speed, so your page-per-minute ratio will go up over time. Remember, though, that if you’re turning a page before you have absorbed the information you need from the text – whether that’s four key words or an entire paragraph – then you’re not reading efficiently, because nine times out of ten you’ll have to go back and re-read that page, looking for what you missed the first time.

To increase your reading efficiency, get rid of the things that cause you to lose focus on your main goal, which is getting the information you need. The 7 Speed Reading program will help you do this, by teaching you how to:
– improve your ability to focus your mind
– learn the difference between skimming text and skipping text
– lose the habit of subvocalization
– increase your ability to read blocks of text rather than single words

Focus on efficiency, and your reading speed and comprehension will increase.

We’ve mentioned before that one of the things that slows people down when they’re reading is the habit of regressing, or backtracking, through material that they’ve already read. If this is something that slows you down, one of the ways to overcome this habit is to have confidence in your brain’s ability to deal with logic and patterns. You might be afraid of missing meaning in the text if you haven’t “read every word.” This could be a habit or thought process you picked up when in school, and which you never learned you could let go.

Your brain will fill in the “missing” information that your eyes are picking up through peripheral vision and process everything into a complete picture. Yo-r br :n h s s-ff:c:ent b ckgro-nd :nformat:on from th:ngs yo-‘ve  lre dy le rned to -nconsc:o-sly f:n:sh the words :n th:s sentence wh:ch  re m:ss:ng letters. This ability to recognize and match patterns is what helps us make sense of hard-to-read handwriting, or to come up with answers that fit the data we have, even if it’s incomplete.

Did you backtrack to re-read that last paragraph, or did you allow your brain to fill in the missing letters for you? If you didn’t need to see all of the letters in the words in the second sentence in the paragraph to understand it, why do you need to focus your eyes on every letter in every word to understand any sentence? And if you don’t need to focus on every letter, why do you need to focus on every word?

Let the powerful processing and computational machine that is your brain take over and do the work it was designed to do, and give your eyes a rest. Your brain will use the context of the phrase to assemble the full meaning for you.

Have you ever been in a theatre watching a play and lost track of the plot or the characters because so much is happening? When you have a lot of information to deal with quickly, sometimes it’s difficult to hold on to the overall ideas as well as the specific details and facts. That’s one reason why theatre programs often include a brief synopsis of the play and a list of the characters. Audience members can skim through the plot summary, make a note of the names of the characters and their relationships, and have a much better idea once the play starts of who’s on stage and what they’re doing. At the end of the performance, the audience will walk away with a more complete memory of the play, because they will have seen the plot and the characters more than once, and will have understood the play more thoroughly.

In the same way, you can improve your reading speed and retention of information by doing a “preview” of the material you need to read. While this might seem to be just something that adds additional time to the process, you’ll find that it actually saves time by eliminating re-reading and going back to fill in missing information. This technique is particularly helpful when you need to read something like a textbook or technical document, but can also be used in other situations (for example, reading a novel required for a university class).

To preview material, first look at the table of contents. Reading through this and noting the main topic areas will give you a mental “map” of the textual terrain that you’ll be covering. If there are any unfamiliar terms used in the chapter headings, be sure to look them up now, rather than when you’re in the middle of reading those chapters. Being prepared for what you’ll be reading will speed up the reading process, and you won’t have to stop for words you don’t know.

If there’s an introduction and a conclusion, read through them both first. The introduction will prepare you for the discussion to follow, and the conclusion will summarize the information. If you see the “shape” of the text, it will be easier to keep track of where you are and where you’re going. Some authors also put chapter summaries at the beginning of each section. If so, you can read these sequentially. It’s possible that the information you need is in these sections, if you want a high-level view of the text, and you might not need to read the chapters themselves unless you’re looking for a specific piece of data.

Once you’ve previewed the text, you’re ready to read, prepared with the knowledge of what you’ll be reading, where the author is heading with his or her conclusions, and with a good idea of where you’ll find the information you need.

You won’t get ahead in business if you don’t have time to deal with all of the information that comes your way. For example, many people have regular meetings they have to attend; you might have some on your schedule this week, in fact. Did you get copies of an agenda, or were you e-mailed documents to look over before the meeting date? Managers notice when employees come to meetings without having read the handouts sent to them earlier in the week. It wastes time in the meeting to have to summarize that information for one or two people when the rest have read the handouts. If you’re able to quickly read a document and summarize the information for yourself, you’ll give the impression that you’re alert, capable, and on top of things.

Even if you aren’t invited to a particular meeting, you might be on the distribution list. These days, it’s easy to send things out by e-mail without going through the process of making copies, and many people take advantage of this to send out information to everyone they think might need it. Even if the material is in paper format, our modern computer-driven copiers can create a stack of fifty double-sided stapled packets of paper for distribution, using different types of paper for the front and back covers, and have them ready for you in the time it takes for you to arrange to have coffee and snacks delivered to the conference room where you’ll hand them out to the people at the meeting. Again, the down side of this is that it’s easy to make extra copies, and those extra copies are given out to anyone who “might be interested” or “could find this useful.” If that’s you, you still have to make the determination if you really do need that information, and the only way to know is to read through it before putting in your business file (or the “circular file”).

All of these e-mails, whether sent to you directly or via an e-mail group or listserv, will overwhelm you with messages in your in-box. If you don’t have time to look at all of your messages, you might miss the one from your boss asking for a quick answer to a question. Depending on the importance of the question, and when the answer is needed, missing that one specific e-mail message could cost your company money or the good opinion of an important client. In any event, it won’t help your reputation as a responsive and competent employee.

Increasing your reading speed will help you quickly sort through all of the information you’re sent daily, and contribute to your success at work.