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.
