Some reasons for increasing your reading speed are obvious. For example, the quicker you get through a text, the more time you’ll have to do other things. This is important in a busy work day when you may need to scan and process dozens of reports or hundreds of e-mail attachments. However, there are important aspects of reading speed that you may not have thought about, and they’re ones that can actually have a profound negative effect on your productivity, your intellectual ability, and even your health.

Slow reading speed leads to fatigue. If it takes too long for you to read through a piece of text, you’ll start to get tired. Your eyes will start to itch and burn, your brain will begin to lose focus and get distracted, and your body will experience fatigue at being in one position, especially if you’re holding a heavy book or sitting at a desk. Each of these problems combine and make the others worse, and the longer you sit and try to finish the text, the harder it will be, as you become more and more uncomfortable and irritable.

Slow reading speed actually reduces comprehension. As children, we were taught to read ‘slowly and carefully’ to make sure that we understood everything that we read. While this works for small amounts of text that you need to understand, like a legal contract before you sign it, when you’re faced with larger amounts of text reading too slowly will be detrimental. You’ll find that you have difficulty remembering the overall concepts, logic, and purpose of the text you started long before you reach the end. You’ll get bored. You’ll forget important material from the beginning of the text and be unable to understand points made at the end, forcing you to re-read the previous text.

Slow reading speed is a habit you can break. Many people assume that a person’s reading speed is the same as the speed at which they speak out loud. Unfortunately, for people who retain the reading habits of childhood, that’s essentially correct. The average rate of speech is 150 words per minute, and most people read at that speed as well, because they are still reading “out loud” in a way, using subvocalization, moving their lips while they read, or simply hearing the words in their head as they read – all habits that were learned when they first were taught to read.

By using the 7 Speed Reading course, you won’t learn how to read. You’ll learn how to read better.