How To Speed Read

This is a short, different post. But this weekend I am reading Frederica, by by Georgette Heyer with my sister. It’s a very long book (my favorite genres are gothic, regency stuff like Bronte, Stoker, and Austen) and I was thinking about how much easier reading has become as I’ve gotten older and written about 500,000 words in the last ten years of my life. My brain has assembled itself to make reading a very efficient task. It kind of has to in order to be able to hold 10,000 words at a time when crafting a book, even as poor a writer as I am. But when I first learned to speed read I wished that someone had taught me how to do it when I was younger, and I would have perhaps read twice as many books as I have. My own works are very long, exhausting even, which makes their consumption a more difficult task for those who are not efficient readers. I don’t remember exactly who I learned speed reading from, I think it was a mix of internet sources. But here is how I learned and some instructions on how to speed read.

First, speed reading is not about speed—or, more accurately, it’s not about learning an impressive skill to show off. If the focus is on how fast you are reading you will miss important information. There’s no point in reading fast if you don’t actually pay attention to what is going on. The purpose of speed reading is to stop the brain from pronouncing every single word in your head. There’s no need to do it, but because of the way we are taught to read as children most of us never learn how to actually stop doing it.

It’s also not helpful to attempt fast reading at first. It’s much like playing the piano—if you practice fast you will be sloppy. Start slow. First, instead of reading every word in your mind when reading, take two words at a time. Just look at them without saying them in your mind. Then the next two. Then the next two, and so on. Once that starts to feel natural, take in about three words at time and continue. Just like practicing any skill, as you do this for several sessions it will start to feel natural.

Once your ability to take in several words at time feels easy and comfortable, move on to taking in whole phrases at once. This is where speed reading really starts to pay off, because the brain starts to take in whole thoughts at once, rather than lingering on one single word at a time. Most writing is done like speech, in phrases, so looking at each phrase all at once brings each thought into the mind at once. Then each phrase can be read in the time it used to take to read one word.

Reading phrase to phrase instead of word to word increases reading speed by many magnitudes, making it easy not only to read lots of information, but also to retain it.