The Modern Student

As a student, being able to read efficiently and effectively is one of the most valuable faculties that you can easily develop. While studying or doing research for assignments or keeping up with notes in class, you constantly assimilate information through reading.

Speed Reading can help you to read and understand written information much more quickly. This makes it an essential skill in any environment where you have to master large volumes of information quickly, like school, college and especially university. What's more, it's a key technique to learn if you suffer from "information overload", because it helps you to become much more discriminating about the information that you consume. It helps you to take in more information in a shorter time, making you more efficient in doing this.

There is an abundance of excellent speed reading courses available on the internet, many of them for free, but let us begin to look at how you can increase your reading speed with a few basic but highly effective techniques.

Fundamentally, there are two types of reading: the first type is a speaking aloud of words as they are read. This may be at an inaudible and sub-conscious level, but is nevertheless expressing perceived words in equivalent movements of the tongue and larynx - a kinaesthetic representation. This means that while you read, you ‘hear’ the words as you pronounce them internally, like an internal dialogue. We will call this process 'sub vocalisation’. Because sub vocalization has a physical or ‘mechanical’ counterpart where the tongue and larynx wants to move in accordance with the words being read and sub vocalized, this acts as a kind of a governor or limitation on your reading speed. It effectively keeps you from reading faster than you can speak.

The second type of reading we call 'thought-stream' reading, and this consists of understanding and imagery only, with no internal vocal or subvocal expression. This ‘thought stream’ is what you encounter while thinking, and what is important, is that the ‘thought stream’ operates at the same speed at which you think. Your mind is accustomed to this tempo of information flow, and thus it makes sense to read at the same speed as that at which your mind easily assimilates information.

Generally speaking, sub vocalisation is unnecessary to the adult reader, except perhaps when reading poetry (in which case rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration are an important component, and so subvocalisation may be more enjoyable when poetry is read silently). However, subvocalisation limits the maximum reading speed to about +/- 300 w.p.m. In contrast, a trained reader may read at more than 1000 words per minute with a pure thought-stream. A thought-stream is also essential for comprehensive understanding and memory retention.

Apart from not using sub vocalization, a fast reader makes use of their peripheral vision, or the entire scope of their vision, and not only where their eyes are focusing. When reading, your eyes tend to skip from word to word one by one, and it is in actual fact not a smooth continuous movement. When using your peripheral vision, you can see more than one word per eye movement, or ‘skip’. If you can read two words per eye movement, your eyes theoretically moves only half as much while reading a page, for example. The more words you can read per eye movement using your peripheral vision, the faster you read. If you combine this with the thought stream reading technique, you will, within two or three days of practise, begin to see dramatic improvements in your reading speed and comprehension.

Although it may be possible to read light material such as a novel without using a thought-stream at all, memory will be impaired. The thought-stream is particularly important when reading abstract material that cannot be easily visualised, and when long and complicated sentence constructions are used. When this type of material is read and the thought-stream is suppressed, it is nearly impossible to preserve word order and syntax. When the material is difficult to visualise, syntax and word order may be the only guides to meaning and understanding.

Take some time to practise these techniques. I urge you to pursue more detailed speed reading courses, as the ability to read fast, understand and remember what you read, is of tremendous value to any student.

Here are three usefull videos from youtube about speed reading...

Video Source: http://www.youtube.com/user/MathCrazyTutoring#p/u