Have you ever opened up a reference book or a text-dense page on the internet and felt your heart sink a little, thinking, “It will take forever to read through this to find the information I want!” Even when you’ve increased your reading speed, you might be intimidated by the sheer amount of material you need to go through for a major research project, company presentation, or graduate thesis. There’s one trick to effective speed reading that will help, however, and that’s skimming for keywords. One of the 7 Speed Reading exercises helps you learn this technique, but even if you’re not using the software, you can practice on your own.

For this exercise, it’s useful to have someone to help you. That’s because what you’ll be doing is scanning for specific words on a page, and this exercise is most helpful if you don’t already know where those words are. You can use a book or document that you need to read through anyway, or if you don’t have a specific project right now, choose material that is at a fairly high reading level. Ask your study partner to choose one or two full pages of text and have them go through the text to select ten different words. These words can be of any length, but it’s best to choose unique words (not ones that are used multiple times, like the or and). Once they have the list of words, take the page(s) and have them give you the first word. Start skimming and scanning the text to look for that word, and repeat for all words on the list. You can even time yourself to see how long it takes to find each word.

Here’s a quick example of how this works. Read the paragraph below and look for the word departed.

Mrs. Hableton was a lady with a grievance, as anybody who happened to become acquainted with her soon found out. It is Beaconsfield who says, in one of his novels, that no one is so interesting as when he is talking about himself; and, judging Mrs. Hableton by this statement, she was an extremely fascinating individual, as she never by any chance talked upon any other subject. What was the threat of a Russian invasion to her as long as she had her special grievance—once let that be removed and she would have time to attend to these minor details which affected the colony. The grievance Mrs. Hableton complained of, was want of money; not an uncommon one by any means, but on being reminded of this, Mrs. Hableton would reply snappishly that she “know’d that, but some people weren’t like other people,” the meaning of which mystical remark was simply this: She had come out to the colonies in the earlier days, when there was not so much difficulty in making money as now, but owing to a bad husband, had failed to make any. The late Mr. Hableton—for he had long since departed this life—was addicted to the intemperate use of the flowing bowl, and at the time when he should have been earning money, was generally to be found in a drinking shanty, spending his wife’s earnings in standing treat for himself and his friends. The constant drinking and the hot Victorian climate soon carried him off, and when Mrs. Hableton had seen him safely under the ground in the Melbourne Cemetery, she returned home to survey her position, and see how it could be bettered.
(from “The Mystery of a Hansom Cab” by Fergus W. Hume)

By using keywords to help you quickly identify only those sections of a document that contain the information you really need, you’ll cut down on the time it takes to go through text. You’ll be more efficient at research, more productive at work, and altogether a better speed reader!