Speed Reading Radically Increasing Your Reading Speed Speed Reading helps you to read and understand text more quickly. It is an essential skill in any environment where you have to master large volumes of information quickly, as is the norm in fast-moving professional environments. And it's a key technique to learn if you suffer from "Information Overload." The Key Insight The most important trick about speed reading is to know what information you want from a document before you start reading it: if you only want an outline of the issue that the document discusses, then you can skim the document quickly and extract only the essential facts. If you need to understand the real detail of the document, then you need to read it slowly enough to understand it fully. The Mind Tools E-Book contains all of the tools on the Mind Tools site, brought together into one easy-to-download, easy-to-print PDF. You will get the greatest time savings from speed reading by learning to skim excessively detailed documents. Technical Issues Even when you know how to ignore irrelevant detail, there are other technical improvements you can make to your reading style which will increase your reading speed. Most people learn to read the way young children read - either letter-by-letter, or word-by-word. As an adult, this is probably not the way you read now - think about how your eye muscles are moving as you read this. You will probably find that you are fixing your eyes on one block of words, then moving your eyes to the next block of words, and so on. You are reading blocks of words at a time, not individual words one-by-one. You may also notice that you do not always go from one block to the next: sometimes you may move back to a previous block if you are unsure about something. A skilled reader will read many words in each block. He or she will only dwell on each block for an instant, and will then move on. Only rarely will the reader's eyes skip back to a previous block of words. This reduces the amount of work that the reader's eyes have to do. It also increases the volume of information that can be examined in a period of time. A poor reader will become bogged down, spending a lot of time reading small blocks of words. He or she will skip back often, losing the flow and structure of the text and overall understanding of the subject. This irregular eye movement makes reading tiring. Poor readers tend to dislike reading, and may find it harder to concentrate and understand written information.
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