What is the Best Speed Reading Technique?

Think about how much more work you could do if you could learn a simple speed reading technique that could give you 100% comprehension while taking only half of the time. The reality is that there are many different speed reading techniques that, if practiced, can easily increase your reading speed.

We'll focus on the techniques that you can use to increase your eye movement speed, because that is the essential aspect of learning the speed reading technique. Comprehension is very important obviously, but is best learned with practice.

Start by taking a single sheet of letter paper and draw four dots, one on each corner of the paper. Every day, all you need to do is practice moving your eyes from dot to dot without moving your head. Make sure that you work with the natural flow of reading, or, in other words, start at the top left, then move to the top right, then bottom left and bottom right. Do this three times a day for between sixty and ninety seconds at a time.

You should also practice picking up on words in chunks. There are a lot of opportunities for this in a business world, but if you are not getting memos or new materials now and again, it may help to use an encyclopedia to practice this speed reading technique. What you want to do is scan down a page of information in chunks, grasping the basic ideas and larger words that you can pick up on multiple times in a single document. For each regularly sized page, you are given twenty seconds, and only twenty seconds, to scan all the way down to the bottom.

Once you make it through that page or section of text, put it aside and synthesize what you've scanned, and see if you can make a guess as to what the entire document was about. As you practice more, you'll get really good at this, and that's when you know you're getting closer to your goal. While you'll never learn to actually read this fast, this is basic practice for learning to pick out important words and meanings from the rest of the document.

The final speed reading training tip that you should practice is the ability to read with your peripheral vision. Moving your eyes from side to side is a time consuming and unnecessary step when you're reading. To practice your peripheral vision, take the page or document you are reading and put it down on your desk, one page length away from the center of your desk. Now stare at the center of your desk, and without moving your head, read the page as slowly as you need to. When you change pages, change sides so that you can practice with both eyes. As you get better with this, you should be able to pick up whole sentences and lines within only two seconds.