Reading Speed is an important and often overlooked skill in academics and professional life. A higher reading speed helps you to boost your productivity by improving your comprehension and the time taken to read any text. In this blog post, we give you two simple techniques to improve your reading speed today! You can apply these techniques and increase your reading speed drastically!
Glance through words without repeating in mind
While reading any text or book, we make the common mistake of repeating the words consciously in our mind similar to how we read loudly. While reading loudly, we first look at the word, and then we say it loudly. However, due to habit, while reading in mind too, we tend to repeat the words in our mind. This means we are reading the same word two times, and this reduces our speed of reading.
While reading in the mind, we should simply glance at the words one-by-one and let our mind construct images of the words.
Let us do a quick exercise:
Just look at the below words in your mind, without repeating them in your mind:
Tree
Sky
Birds
Yellow
Bridge
Book
Village
Spaceship
Computer
Road
Did you notice something? Did your mind paint a picture of all of the above?
You see, even without making the effort to repeat the words in your mind, just by looking at the words, your mind can create pictures of the words.
You can use this to your advantage while reading any text or book. Just look at the words one by one and your mind will construct an image of it. This will help you read effortlessly and almost double your reading speed.
Practice this technique once, before moving to the next paragraph!
Read 2-3 words at a time
Another mistake that we make while reading books is that we read each word one by one. Instead of looking at words one by one, we should look at words in a group of two, three or four.
Let us do a quick exercise:
Read the below words one by one as underlined:
I want to go to the National Park and walk in the woods until sunset.
Now read the same sentence with groups of words below as underlined:
I want to go to the National Park and walk in the woods until sunset.
Which one was faster?
When you read words as groups, it further increases your reading speed and also improves your comprehension. When you read a sentence word-b-word, you may tend to get lost in words. But, when you read a sentence as a group of words, you understand the meaning of the sentence better and that too at a better reading speed.
Practice and Read more
The best way to improve your reading speed is to start practising and reading more books. Meritstore has a plethora of reading suggestions for you to start your reading journey. Apply the techniques learnt in this blog post and you will be surprised to see how you are now able to read texts effortlessly and more confidently too, at better reading speeds. Let us know in the comments below!
Now start reading new books with Top 5 books for Beginners in each genre!
Add Comment