Try This Ten Minute Speed Reading Course

The typical speed reading course is expensive and promises something new. The truth is that most courses advise the same basic strategies, which are laid out below. This little lesson in itself can increase your reading speed dramatically if you practice, and if you want to go further with your efforts there is a recommendation following the article, for a course that is affordable and efficient.

Step One: Learn Speed Reading Shortcuts

In most of the things you will read the important elements are in the first and last parts of each paragraph. This is true of this paragraph, for example. Thus, if you want to quickly get the "meat" of the article or book or other piece of writing, you can scan the paragraphs and focus on the first and last sentences. In addition, important parts are often in bullet points or lists. Thus, you can speed up your comprehension of written works by scanning for highlighted, italicized and otherwise emphasized parts.

Step Two: Expand Your Vision

Practice taking in more of what is front of you by trying to read a whole sentence at once. If this isn’t possible, you can perhaps take in a whole fragment of a sentence and work up to longer ones. This kind of practice gets you in the habit of using more of your peripheral vision - that part of the scene that is to the left or right (or above and below) your point of focus. Eventually you can learn to comprehend whole sentences or at least several words at one glance, thus speeding up your reading.

Step Three: Force Your Speed

The basic idea here is to force yourself to read faster, initially without any concern for comprehension. Use your fingers to guide you, gliding them down the page as you read. You can start by reading normally to see where your speed is at. Then force the speed. If, for example, you normally read ten pages of a novel in twenty minutes, or two minutes-per-page, Move your fingertips down the page at a rate that is three or four times as fast, and follow with your eyes, reading as well as you can.

Do this a couple times, and then try it even faster. Aim for ten times as fast as normal. You will almost certainly not understand what you’re reading at that speed, but that’s okay. Keep doing this several times at the fastest speed, for about ten pages each time. After you have practiced this for a while, try ten more pages at a speed that is comfortable enough for normal comprehension. You’ll notice that you are reading faster than before, and still understanding what you read at least as well as you used to. The forced speed adjusts your habitual reading speed upwards.

These three steps are what the average speed reading course will teach you. You can do this on your own as described here, but there are advantages to having a full course. Many come with recorded instruction, for example, and tell you when to turn the page as you do the forced-speed exercise. This makes it much easier to do the exercise consistently. A good low-cost speed reading course is recommended below.