Reading is not only important for studying, learning and discovering new words, it is an essential activity for relaxation, personal development and intelligence. Think you don’t have time to read and would like to optimize your daily schedule better? Do you need to finish a book and are reading too slowly? Whatever the reasons, in the next article we’ll show you how to read faster and better process the information you read to make it easier to understand.
Techniques to read faster:
1. Take care of your environment
In order to learn to read quickly and understand a text better, not only reading techniques are important, but also the environment in which reading takes place. Whether at the office or at home, it is important to find a quiet place where you can concentrate. To do this, you need to take into account different aspects:
2. Find a quiet place.
Being calm and relaxed while reading is essential to concentrate and understand a text better. To do this, we recommend looking for places without distractions, where you can concentrate only on what you are reading.
3. Lighting matters.
Another key consideration when preparing your environment to read properly is the lighting in the room. Reading in dim light, in addition to slowing down reading and making it hard to concentrate, can cause headaches. Without good light, reading will become much harder and it will be difficult to maintain a good pace. Always look for good natural light for reading, desk or floor lamps, or even a special mini-lantern for reading. Read also how light intensity affects our ability to concentrate
4. Stay comfortable.
Maintaining a good posture and using bookends for your books will improve your comfort, allowing you to read better and much faster. To read well you need to find the right moment, feel relaxed and find the method that works best for you. If, for example, it is very uncomfortable to read a thick book, try reading it in digital format.
5. Read in groups of words.
One of the exercises for reading faster that works best is not to read the whole sentence word by word. What does that mean exactly? Very simply, when we talk about skipping word groups we are simply referring to mentally grouping words (between 2 and 4) to read them faster without having to go word by word. The idea is to take mental pictures of the sentence divided into groups of words and read them peripherally to save time. Although this technique can be a little tricky at first, with practice you’ll notice great results.
6. Eliminate subvocalisation.
Subvocalization is a habit of mentally repeating what we’re reading, and while it’s a natural reflex, this habit can slow down the reading process a lot, but how do you eliminate subvocalization?
7. Scan before you read.
The scan-before-reading trick is very useful for reading a text quickly without paying attention to details, which can help you read documents or texts that you need to contextualise quickly and don’t have enough time for. For scanning, you can make an “S” with your finger across the page, forcing your eyes to follow. You won’t get all the information with this scan, but you’ll catch the most important words.
8. Try not to reread.
Either through distraction or unconsciously, re-reading greatly slows down your reading rate and is a habit many can’t break. If you don’t have time to finish a text and need to read quickly, try to concentrate and absorb the most important concepts on the first reading. To achieve this, it is essential to apply some of the tips given above: seek comfort and a calm environment for reading.
9. Read more!
There are no speed reading exercises that work better than regular reading. If you get your brain used to reading every day, you will gain speed and improve all the reading techniques mentioned above, which will mean less time and more reading comprehension.
So with exercise you help to read faster and better!
