In this post, we talked about how increasing your reading speed can help you improve your spelling by exposing you to more words and giving you practice seeing those words used in context. Did you know that learning to spell correctly will help you become a better reader, too? When you learn the rules of spelling words in English, you’ll be able to apply them to the new words you come across when reading.

When you come across an unfamiliar word while you’re reading, it will slow you down. If you don’t know the meaning of the word, you’ll have to stop and look it up, or run the risk of losing an important piece of information in the text. However, if you’ve studied the rules of English spelling, you’ll be able to apply those rules to the new words you come across while you’re reading. One of the reasons for this is that words which have the same etymological roots – that is, their meanings are related – often have similar spelling patterns. Being able to identify these patterns can also give you clues about the definition of an unfamiliar word.

One of the ways that you can increase your reading speed is by eliminating subvocalization, the habit of saying words to yourself as you read, whether you say those words out loud, just move your lips as you read, or only “hear” the words in your head. One of the reasons that spelling practice helps to eliminate this habit is that when you know how a word is spelled, you’ll know how it’s pronounced. Subvocalization often occurs because you’re mentally trying to “sound out” a word you don’t know how to pronounce; when you recognize a word and know how it sounds already, you won’t unconsciously think you need to say it in order to read it.

If you combine speed-reading techniques with vocabulary improvement and spelling practice, these three learning tools will work together to increase your skills even faster than any one of them alone.

Do you want to work on acquiring new English vocabulary? This blog will help.

How have your practice sessions been going? You might find that moving your eyes quickly back and forth seems to cause strain, or at least feels very awkward. Like any other muscles in your body, the muscles of the eyes need to be exercised. You can use the software games and exercises in the 7 Speed Reading program to strengthen and train your eye muscles, or just practice the reading flow exercise described in the last post, moving slowly at first and then more quickly, without necessarily practicing the reading comprehension aspect of the exercise each time.

You’ve been using your pen or pencil to help track the lines of the text you’re reading from beginning to end. Now start to practice widening your visual focus and strengthening your peripheral vision by bringing your pen or pencil closer to the middle with each line. That is, start the movement of the pen/pencil a little bit in from the edge of the text, and end it a little bit before the edge of the text. Keep your eyes on the text where the pen is, and don’t strain to see the text at the left or right edge. By relaxing the focus of your eyes a little bit, you’ll widen your visual field and your eyes will see the words in your peripheral vision and unconsciously process them, so you won’t miss anything in the meaning of the text.

Part of learning to use your peripheral vision effectively is learning to have confidence that your visual cortex is absorbing and processing the information that you’re not looking directly at. If you have doubts about your brain’s ability to pick up all of the details, think about looking at anything – the top of your desk at work or home is probably a good example, if it’s anything like our desk. You can look at the top of the desk covered with papers, pens, books, ticket stubs, etc. and even if you only look at it briefly, your eyes have taken in every detail and transmitted those details to your brain. The trick is learning how to let your brain handle that information without your thoughts (negative or positive) getting in the way.

Keep practicing this reading technique, and you’ll find that your ability to read text will become much easier and faster over time.

Are you familiar with the sport of curling? It’s an old Scottish sport, played on ice. One player slides a heavy weight called a “stone” towards a target, while a fellow team member uses a broom to brush the surface of the ice just ahead of the moving stone, to make the path smoother so that the stone will travel farther. You can do the same thing to increase the flow and speed of your reading.

Practice by using a pen or pencil to trace underneath the lines of text in a book you’re currently reading. First, get your hand used to the motion by sweeping it back and forth down each of the lines in turn. Let your eyes follow the motion, but don’t worry if you’re not focusing on the words at the same time. Once your hand is comfortable with the motion, so that you don’t have to use your mind to concentrate on doing it, move the concentration of your mind into your eyes, and track the motion of the pen/pencil with your eyes, letting your eyes take in the words that the pen/pencil is moving under. Don’t worry if you don’t focus on all of the words.

Now do the same exercise again using the same text, but this time work on relaxing your eyes. When you do, you’ll notice that you can visually absorb more than one word at a time. The goal is to take in groups of words, not single words. Because it takes time for your eyes to focus on a piece of text, process it via the visual cortex, and move to the next piece of text, if you’re doing this process word by word it will be slow and jumpy. If you’re taking in groups of words it will be faster and smoother.

Make sure that your eyes are what’s moving, not your head. If you’re moving your head back and forth, you’ll put strain on your neck muscles, and that will take your focus away from your reading and also cause pain and fatigue, which will make it even harder to read easily.

Practice this exercise several more times, using different types of text. Work on increasing your speed and pushing yourself just a little faster each time. In the next post, we’ll talk more about using this sweeping technique, and how you can use it to increase the number of words in each group.

Many people who work on improving their English grammar, vocabulary, or spelling skills find that they end up reading more often than before. Some of this is study material, but some is also reading for pleasure, and learning to appreciate and look for good writing and interesting vocabulary words. The more you read, the more words you’ll be exposed to, and (if the author is a good speller also) the more correctly-spelled words you’ll see and become familiar with. One of the best ways to improve your spelling is to read as much as possible so that you can see how words are spelled and how they’re used in context. By increasing your reading speed, you’ll be able to read and absorb more information. If you’re interested in improving your spelling skills, you can get some helpful tips here.

The speed at which you read text often depends on what you’re reading, and why. If you’re skimming through text looking for key information – for example, in a handout you’ve been given fifteen minutes before the start of a meeting – then you might not notice the occasional misspelled word in that text. On the other hand, if you’re the person responsible for writing or editing the handout in the example above, it’s crucial that you take the time to read more carefully and correct any mistakes in spelling or grammar.

Whether you’re reading material that is part of your study program or not, you’ll be reading words that you’ve seen before as well as ones that are new to you. We’re sure you’ve had more than one experience of looking at a word that is not correctly spelled and thinking, “That just doesn’t look right.” Take the time to confirm the correct spelling of the word with a dictionary. Don’t rely on spell-check programs to mark mistakes or correct them. While you’re looking up the word, you can also strengthen your understanding of the word by looking at its etymology, associated words and definitions, and any synonyms or antonyms the word might have.

A good speed-reading program will teach you to increase your reading speed but also teach you how to absorb information and recognize things in the text like misspelled words. While you’re reading, even if you’re reading quickly, let your eyes be “caught” by new words or by misspelled words, and teach yourself the correct spelling as you go. If you don’t have time to look up a word right away, make a note of it for later.

Improve your reading skills, and you’ll find that your spelling skills improve just as quickly!

Cross-posted at the Ultimate Spelling blog.

Part of any good speed-reading program involves training your mind as well as your eyes. There are many things that slow down your reading speed, and most of them are because of your mind, not because of your eyes. One of the key speed-reading techniques is learning to focus your mind to concentrate on what you’re reading while keeping your eyes relaxed and moving quickly through the text. With this combination, you’ll find that you’re able to read and comprehend at a faster pace than you thought was possible.

Unhelpful Habit #4: Lack of Focus

As we mentioned in the last post, if you’re afraid of missing something important in the text you’re reading, you’ll slow yourself down. Not only does your reading speed decrease, but having that worry in your mind also interferes with your comprehension of the text. After all, the amount of brain power you’re devoting to worrying about how well you’re reading could actually be devoted to making sure that you are reading well. A lack of focus might also cause you to backtrack, or read something over and over.

If you’re thinking of seven other things at the time you’re reading something, you probably will miss part of what you read. If you aren’t mentally focused on what you’re reading, whether you’re reading slowly and carefully through a legal contract before signing it or just skimming through a magazine article while waiting for your train to arrive, you’ll prevent yourself from absorbing the information, whether it’s information you need to retain or not.

The fix: Learn to pay attention to what you’re reading, in proportion to the need to absorb and remember the information in the text. Everything your brain processes by way of the visual cortex is stored in your memory, but whether it’s put in short-term memory or in long-term memory for future use depends on how you’ve trained your brain to memorize information. Part of that training involves categorizing and sorting information by importance. If you’re flipping through the pages of a weekly magazine in the doctor’s office, your trained brain will probably decide that you don’t really need to remember the details of the catered buffet planned for that television star’s wedding, but when your doctor hands you the list of instructions on how to prepare for your upcoming surgery, your brain and your eyes will definitely focus on each step. Train your brain, and trust your brain, to help you improve both your reading speed and your ability to recall the things you’ve read.

For more information on improving your memory, check out this blog.

You’re faced with a wide range of reading materials every day, from office memos to doctor’s prescriptions, chatty e-mails to legal contracts, encyclopedias to popular novels. Sometimes you’re reading information on a web page that has distracting formatting or images, while other times you’re holding a clearly-printed newspaper in black and white. How quickly you can read each of these depends both the type of material you’re reading and the content of the text. In fact, word-by-word reading can be an unhelpful reading habit, because you might unconsciously be slowing down your own reading speed by the way you read different texts.

Unhelpful Habit #3: Word-by-word Reading

In your early years of learning to read, your teachers or parents probably emphasized the importance of making sure that you read every word. After all, if you skip over words in a story, you might not understand what it’s about. If you skip over words in the questions your teacher gives you, you might get the answers wrong. Unfortunately, the combination of early-learning reading techniques (sounding out words letter by letter or syllable by syllable, reading out loud) and the focus on paying equal attention to every word often results in the adult habit of slow, word-by-word reading.

It’s true that if you don’t read every word in your doctor’s prescription, you might miss an important detail in how you’re supposed to take the medicine, with negative consequences to your health. However, if you don’t read every word in the latest crime thriller, there probably won’t be any negative consequences to your understanding and enjoyment of the book.

The fix: Learn to adjust your reading speed to the material. One of the techniques the 7 Speed Reading program teaches is “clumping” words together to allow your eyes to take in more than one word at a time. In order to do this, you need to practice widening your visual field by using your peripheral vision, and allowing your eyes to focus on groups of words instead of individual words.

Just as important, you need to practice trusting your eyes and your brain to view and process the information. As we mentioned earlier, one thing that slows many people down is a lack of confidence that they’ve actually read the material. Because your brain and visual cortex process information so quickly, once you learn to trust your own ability to read at an accelerated pace, you’ll find that pace increasing.

In the next post: How to get in the habit of focusing your mind.

Many children are taught to read with the instruction to “sound out the word” that they see. When given the word DOG, they’re often encouraged to treat each individual letter separately before putting them together, and first learn to say DUH-AW-GUH. If this becomes an ingrained habit, they may slow themselves down as adults by sounding out syllables and subvocalizing the words they read. This is one of the unhelpful habits the 7 Speed Reading program will help you break.

Unhelpful Habit #2: Subvocalization

When we’re very young, we’re encouraged to sound out each letter and word, so we formed the habit of speaking the words out loud as we read them. Then as we got to be better readers, most of us lost the habit of saying the words out loud (vocalizing), but might still move our lips as we read (subvocalizing). Furthermore, even if we don’t do physically more our lips, we may “sound out” the words in our mind as we read. To improve your reading speed, you need to practice eliminating all of these aspects of subvocalization from your general reading style, because it’s just slowing you down.

The fix: Learn to widen your visual field to take in more than one word at a time. It’s impossible to say three or five words at once out loud, but it’s not impossible for your eyes to take the same number of words in, and for your visual cortex to process them.

If you find that you still have the tendency to say the words out loud or in your head, try occupying your verbal “processors” with something else, by humming to yourself while you read. Don’t try to pick a tune, or sing words – you want your mind to focus on the words you’re reading, not the ones you’re singing – but keep a constant sound going and see if that drowns out your mind’s tendency to subvocalize. If you can no longer “hear” the words you’re reading, you’ll forget that you used to connect the spoken words to the written ones.

In the next post: How to stop reading word for word.

In the last post, we talked about how the process of improving your reading speed is, at least at the beginning, more about unlearning than learning. You’re having to rewire your brain to follow new paths and new patterns. You’re having to teach your eyes new tracks to follow, and to teach your mouth to stay out of the way. One of the hardest habits to break is backtracking.

Unhelpful Habit #1: Backtracking

If you can still hear your primary school teacher’s voice saying something like, “Be sure to read the assignment carefully before you answer the questions!” then you might have the habit of backtracking, or regressing, when you read. This means that rather than reading straight through text, you stop and skip back to re-read words or phrases, or perhaps entire paragraphs. You may have gotten into the habit of rereading text for several reasons. First, if you were reading without paying attention, or you got distracted, you might have skipped over sentences or phrases and suddenly realized that you lost the meaning of the section. On the other hand, you might think you got lost, even if you didn’t, but you go back to make sure.

The fix: Learn to focus on what you’re reading so that you’ll have the confidence to keep going. In general, if you’re reading a novel or a pop-culture magazine, it’s not such a problem when you get distracted by a child crying or a co-worker asking a question. However, if you’re studying for an exam, you need to concentrate. This is partly a mental exercise, and partly a physical one. Train your mind to concentrate on what you’re reading, and if necessary put yourself in an environment where you won’t be distracted.

In the next post: How to overcome a habit of subvocalization.

There’s no magic wand to wave that will instantly make you a speed reader. To really learn how to read more quickly, you need to practice, because you’re working on replacing the habits of all of the years you’ve been reading slowly. After all, most people learned to read at an early age, from teachers who frequently instructed their class to “sound the words out as you go” and “read slowly so you understand everything.” It can be very hard to break habits that were started so long ago, but with practice, it can be done.

Like anything you practice, speed reading will become easier as you go along, and your progress will be measurable. We encourage you to practice for 15 minutes a day. The exercises in the 7 Speed Reading program are perfect for focused practice time, and many of them can be done either at the computer or away from your desk. You can apply those lessons throughout the day to the material you have to read at work, at school or at home.

Because you’re doing things in a different way, it may feel strange at first, but you’ll soon get into new reading habits. Here are some of the old habits you’ll be breaking:
– backtracks and regressing
– subvocalization
– word-by-word reading
– lack of focus

In the next post we’ll start talking about how you can train yourself to lose these old habits and replace them with new habits that will increase your reading speed.