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.