Everyone's reading speed is different, but on average it is 200 words per minute. By practicing speed reading, you can increase this figure by 2-3 times. Continuing your training, you will be able to overcome approximately 200 pages of text in half an hour without compromising the absorption of information.
Basic speed reading techniques
Like everyone else scientific method, speed reading has its own tricks.
Follow the text. To do this, draw along the lines with your finger or pencil. This technique will allow you to read faster.
Don't go back. To do this, you need to concentrate on the material you are studying. How often has it happened that you, lost in thought, missed the meaning of a paragraph or even whole page? Your task is to prevent this from happening. Understand what you read the first time.
Don't say the text to yourself. This technique helps improve your speed reading skill very well, since you will no longer waste time pronouncing words. To do this, use one exercise: while reading, sing to yourself some song, for example, “in the grass,” and at the same time try to grasp the meaning of what you read. Practice this exercise until you stop saying the lines you read to yourself.
Read from top to bottom or diagonally. This is the next step after the “follow the text” technique. You are already experienced enough in speed reading to try to capture an entire paragraph in your field of vision, or at least an entire line, focusing your gaze on its middle. Start small. Master narrow columns of text first, gradually moving to a standard book format.
Skip the water. Interjections, introductory structures and other non-essential elements are not at all necessary to read, this will not affect the meaning in any way. So just skim over them and move on to the essence.
Focus on what's important. This tip may seem similar to the previous one, but it’s a little different. Study the table of contents in advance and prioritize what you need to read and what you can skip. This way, due to lack of time, you will not miss anything important, and if there is time left, you will be able to study less important materials.
Reading, read. Eliminate all irritants, everything that can distract your attention. Then the process of speed reading will be much more pleasant and easier.
How to develop peripheral vision
To do this, use the most popular method - the Schulte table. Your task, concentrating only on the central part of the table, is to find all the numbers in ascending order, using only peripheral vision. On the Internet you can find special simulator tables; below is an example of such a table.
Develop concentration
All sorts of things will help you in this matter. optical illusions, for example, the significant drawing of Covey.
Try to switch your attention 90 times in 10, or better yet, 5 minutes.
The human mind is like a data warehouse with a limited resource free space. If disturbances occur in the process of forgetting unnecessary information, then the mind begins to become overwhelmed. He begins to memorize everything:
- car numbers;
- dates;
- inscriptions and numbers on posters;
- names;
- diet strangers etc.
A person suffers greatly from this.
Women are annoyed that men forget everything. Men are annoyed that women remember everything.
People with phenomenal memory
On at the moment there are 4 officially registered with phenomenal memory. This condition is not congenital. Remembering everything comes from disorders such as autism or obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Bob Petrella. This person is able to remember dates and numbers. Bob used his abilities to create a career. He is the head of a famous sports television channel.
Bob remembers the results of most matches played. If you show him a fragment of a game, he will tell you which teams played, when the match took place and with what score the game ended.
Petrella discovered his phenomenal abilities at the age of 5. His brain remembers all phone numbers, cards, PIN codes. He told. What I once lost mobile phone. But the loss was no cause for concern. Because he stores all the phone numbers in his head.
Jill Price. Jill, starting at the age of 14, remembers her life down to the smallest detail. She most often appeared on television screens and newspaper pages because of her abilities. Jill began to remember everything in detail after suffering trauma and psychological distress. The woman says that her life is like a video camera that is on around the clock. If she needs to remember something, it’s as if she rewinds the tape to the required fragment and remembers. If this woman had lived during war times, she would have made a good spy.
Jill does not lead a popular lifestyle. She teaches at a Jewish school and lives near Hollywood. She herself believes that this gift is more of a burden than a joy. Because it's hard to live with clear unpleasant memories.
Kim Peak. Kim suffered from a brain pathology in the cerebellar part. He was considered a crazy person. However, among other brain abnormalities, the man lost the ability to forget. He could read a book spread in 8 seconds, while remembering up to 99% of the information he read. At the age of 7, Kim knew the Bible by heart. And at the age of 20 I could provide full meeting Shakespeare from memory.
Due to his injuries, Kim was unable to walk fully. His gait was strange. He couldn't even button the buttons on his shirt. The thing is that his brain was aimed at remembering information. Of course, for your own long life he learned to zip up and even play the piano.
Brad Williams. The man works as a radio presenter. He does not consider his phenomenal memory to be a pathology; rather, on the contrary, he takes every opportunity to demonstrate his abilities. Unlike Jill Price, the man prides himself on his ability to remember everything. If you ask him what happened in specific date, he will unmistakably name the significant event on this day.
Brad remembers what day the weather was like. Able to reproduce his diet from a year ago. In America he was called the Google Man. Taking part in one famous TV show, the radio host almost became a winner. The only thing that let him down was that he had little interest in sports. And the questions were of a sporting nature. Brad himself does not consider his abilities supernatural.
Rick Baron. Rick successfully uses his abilities to make money. He does not hold any position, he earns his living by taking part in intellectual competitions.
Rick's memory began to retain everything starting at the age of 11. Since then he has been winning discount coupons and free tickets. Rick's family believes he is suffering. obsessive state. Rick tries to keep everything under control and in order. He does not throw away all paid bills, checks and tickets, but carefully stores them.
Benefits of Speed Reading Skills
Speed reading is a very useful skill. Moreover, the skill of speed reading and memory development needs to be mastered not only by pupils and students, but also by busy people. Speed reading will especially benefit mothers on maternity leave.
The benefits of speed reading include:
- the time spent studying the material is significantly reduced, which is important for those people who have little free time that can be spent usefully;
- increases the ability to process text by quickly finding important information from the entire volume;
- memory, vocabulary, and attention develop;
- studying new materials, both professional and fiction;
- Thanks to books, better quality and quick learning;
- All difficult books will become understood and accessible;
- Learning a new skill will greatly improve your self-confidence and self-esteem.
Speed reading is not only the ability to quickly perceive and process information, but also the development of memory and attentiveness.
How memory affects speed reading skills
Scientists have proven that memory development special attention provides speed reading. But the opposite result has also been proven. Developing your memory has a positive effect on quickly learning speed reading.
To develop speed reading, you need to provide not only various factors influence. Individual characteristics humans also have an impact on the speed of learning. The development of speed reading is influenced by the following:
- stopping in reading due to encountering an unfamiliar word in the text;
- the amount of information a person perceives through peripheral vision.
Memory directly affects speed reading. After all, what more people knows the words, the less time he spends on perceiving the material from the book. Memorizing terms and different words, speed reading and memory development techniques will improve.
Exercises to develop speed reading and memory
Many people wonder how to develop speed reading and memory. To learn to read quickly and clearly, while understanding all the information provided, you need to use the following 3 exercises:
- Choose 1 item. Select 3 details from the object that characterize it. Then close your eyes and imagine the object as clearly and in detail as possible. Open your eyes and compare the real picture and the picture in your imagination. Next, select the other 3 features. Close your eyes and repeat the exercise several times, changing distinctive features subject.
- Read any short text. Close your eyes and try to remember maximum quantity facts from the text. Highlight those things that you need to remember the next time you read the text. Open your eyes and repeat the exercise.
- Take any story and read the first page as usual, read the second page upside down. Then turn the book over and read the second page again. The text you have already studied will be perceived much easier and faster.
- This method suggests reading texts backwards. After this exercise, perception and reading as usual will increase significantly.
- Read some text and, closing your eyes, highlight 3 important details this text. Then open your eyes and check whether important details were remembered correctly. Then close your eyes again and try to remember the other 3 features, come up with a short wording for the text. Repeat the exercise 4-5 times to consolidate.
Conclusion
Speed reading and memory development techniques will improve reading performance by 4-6 times. In addition to exercises for speed reading and memory development, there are many other ways. The main thing is not to be lazy, but to look for suitable techniques for yourself and develop your horizons.
Surely you have heard the expression “technique” more than once. quick reading. But have you done anything to improve your speed reading skills? And what is it like? normal speed reading and how to measure it? Let's talk about what reading speed is and how exactly you can increase it. In addition, we will touch upon such issues as checking reading technique, its types, and also consider the most effective exercises, which will help to significantly increase the speed of perception of text information.
What is reading technique?
Before we figure out how you can read quickly while memorizing the material, let's talk about what reading speed is and how exactly it is measured. We will also touch on the technique of speed reading, which allows you to process texts quite quickly and efficiently. We also note that speed reading and memory development are quite closely related.
Reading speed is the ratio of characters read to the time it takes to read them. This takes into account the understanding of the text, that is, how carefully the reader read it and remembered it.
IN school practice Reading speed is measured in words, but experts recommend measuring it in characters, since the length of words varies.
Speed reading is a set of special techniques and techniques that can significantly increase reading speed and perception of text content. People who master the technique of speed reading have a wide ability to filter the material they read and highlight the main points in it. And most importantly, they can quickly find it in the text necessary information. That is why it is quite important to know what speed reading technique is and how to master it in a short time.
Types of reading
Before we talk about reading techniques and that, let’s say a few words about the types of reading. By the way, we note that most of them are ways to quickly read.
Psycholinguists and people involved in teaching speed reading distinguish several types of familiarization with the text. Thus, we can distinguish in-depth, fast, panoramic, selective, as well as reading-viewing and reading-scanning.
Let's briefly describe each of these types and analyze their features.
- Thus, during in-depth reading, all details are analyzed, what is read is criticized, and conclusions are formulated. This is how scientific literature is usually processed.
- Reading quickly means not only high speed process, but also excellent reading comprehension. This may include familiarization with fiction.
- Panoramic reading uses a technique to expand peripheral vision. That is, a person reading in this way covers a fairly large area of the text with his eyes, which significantly affects speed. This way you can study almost any book.
- In selective reading, only certain parts of the text are processed. It could be individual chapters, sections, paragraphs and even sentences. This is used by students when preparing for exams.
- Reading-viewing is usually used by specialists and students when selecting a particular literature. Looking through a book - annotation, preface, table of contents, a person decides whether he needs it or not.
- When reading-scanning, pages are quickly scanned for search purposes. separate definitions, dates, surnames and first names.
Basic components of reading speed
Before we look at what the speed reading technique is, let’s talk about the components of speed this process. In order to check your reading speed, you first need to know about them.
So, the formula by which reading speed is usually calculated is as follows:
- V = Q x K: T.
Let's now decipher each of these conventions.
Reading speed standards
There are several reading speeds. It is measured in signs, since such a parameter is more objective than such measurements in words.
At the same time, a speed of 900 characters per minute is considered very slow. Slow is equivalent to 1200 characters per minute. A person who reads 1500 characters per minute reads average speed. 1800 characters are considered above average. Fast reading implies a speed of 3,000 characters, very fast - 5,000, and people who master more than 10,000 characters per minute are considered to have mastered ultra-fast reading speed.
Checking reading speed
Before we talk about exercises that will help you significantly improve your reading speed, it’s worth checking it out. To do this, you can either use special programs or check it yourself, although this may not be entirely accurate data. If you decide to use the second option, then you will definitely need the help of someone from your family or friends, a text, a stopwatch.
We start by picking up an unfamiliar text, then ask you to time the time it takes you to read it. Let's start reading. Upon completion, you should be asked a couple of questions about the text. If you answered them, that's very good. If not, it’s worse. By the way, we note that speed reading and memory development are two inseparable things. If you read fairly quickly and do not remember what you read, then speed reading is out of the question.
Next, we count the number of characters read in the text (this can be done using the Word program (Statistics) by highlighting the desired segment). Then we use the above formulas and calculate our reading speed. Here we note that the understanding coefficient is not worth calculating.
This way, you can determine for yourself whether you should improve your reading speed or not.
Why improve your reading speed?
The main reason why you should develop speed reading skills is to increase your perception of information. We are constantly surrounded by various messages, and it is quite important that we have time to perceive and remember them in time. And if the perception of sound and visual information happens quite quickly and it is almost impossible to develop this skill, then the perception of text messages occurs quite slowly and directly depends on our reading speed. That is why speed reading skills should be developed, and this should be done not only for adults, but also for children. And that is why speed reading for children is quite a necessary skill.
In addition, this process develops memory and attention. It is reliably known that the more a person reads, the more literate and developed he is. And in order to read a lot, you need to be able to read quickly.
Let us also note that people always strive to master special skills that not everyone has. So, speed reading also applies to them. Once you master it, you will be able to clear conscience tell your friends and acquaintances about your achievements.
Reasons for low reading speed
These and many other things significantly reduce the ability to quickly master speed reading. There are special exercises for children and adults that help solve these problems.
Methods for developing reading technique
If you want to master any speed reading method, then you definitely need to know about a variety of techniques and methods that will help you significantly improve your perception of information.
In principle, every psycholinguist and specialist in this field develops his own method of teaching speed reading, focusing on one or another set of exercises.
The most famous of them are the quick reading method of Oleg Andreev and Andrey Spodin.
All of them are based on the same principles - to expand a person’s field and angle of vision, teach him to avoid regressions and articulatory movements when reading, develop memory and thinking, and the ability to critically perceive and remember text.
It doesn’t matter whose technique you choose, the main thing is that it is easy and interesting for you to practice it.
Below we offer you exercises that form the basis of almost every speed reading course.
Exercises to develop reading speed
If you want to develop your speed reading skills, we recommend that you work on it daily. To do this, you need to set aside at least an hour of free time for studying and perform simple exercises, which we will now tell you about.
- When reading the text, cover each line you read. blank slate paper. You can use your hand instead of a piece of paper. The main thing is not to go back and open lines you have already read.
- Work with gradually expanding your angle of view. By the way, the fast reading technique also implies the presence of a wide angle of view.
- While reading, be sure to keep it on your lips index finger- this will help prevent articulation, that is, pronouncing the read text with your lips.
- Do not be distracted by extraneous sounds, try to read in silence and concentrate your attention on the text as much as possible.
- After reading, retell to yourself what you read, check whether you remember everything or whether something escaped you.
Install special programs, which help you quickly read texts. This way you can change the pace of reading and gradually get used to it. Below we will offer you several such programs and talk a little about what speed reading techniques exist for children.
Programs for developing speed reading skills
We figured out what reading is, its speed, we remembered a few quite simple exercises that will help us improve our performance. Let's now look at programs for quick reading. Here are three of the most famous and used ones.
- The Spritz program helps you read texts quickly. You enter the piece you need into the field and set the speed at which the program reads it. It is very good for testing not only your reading speed, but also mastering the material in record time.
- The second program is Psy games. This is a whole set of various exercises that will help expand your field of vision, improve memory, attention, and reaction.
- We also note another complex for improving reading skills - Speed reading software. With its help you can also significantly improve your reading speed.
Teaching children speed reading
The last thing worth mentioning is teaching children how to speed read. As we have already said, this skill will be quite useful both for the development of memory and attention of your son or daughter, and for further education at school or university.
Some tips for those who want to know how to teach a child to read quickly. In order to teach children to read quickly, you first need to show them that they can do it. To do this, you can conduct the following experiment. Let the text be read, but you should limit the reading time to one minute. Then count the number of words in the read section of the text and ask the child to read it again. At the same time, note the time again. The text will be read faster the second time, which means you can prove to your child that the more he reads, the more his reading speed increases.
Be sure to ask your child after reading what exactly he learned from the text. This will help teach you to read not only quickly, but also carefully.
Let us note that any method of quick reading for children will be interesting only if you try to interest the child and engage with him in game form without forcing him to do something he doesn’t want.
Conclusions
So, we have figured out what the speed reading technique is and how important it is to master it. We found out what types of reading exist, what prevents us from reading quickly and how we can overcome these obstacles. We also talked about how to teach a child to read and develop his skills.
We hope our article was useful.
Speed reading techniques are in great demand today. After all, with its help you can not only understand the text better, but also spend less time on it.
Fast reading actually turns out to be not so much learning to read quickly as developing a skill quick search and information analysis. In order to successfully master this technique, you must keep in mind the basic principles of speed reading. After all, the idea of speed reading is not only to quickly swallow the text, but also to read the text faster and more competently. Speed reading involves a lot cognitive processes, which is extremely useful for the reader, whether he is a student on the eve of an exam or a businessman reading the terms of a proposed deal. You can develop speed reading skills at home on your own by repeating the exercises daily.
First exercise
It is aimed specifically at developing reading speed as such. Choose a story and read it from beginning to end. The next step is to read the text backwards, from the end. Repeat this exercise until the text is read equally easily in both directions and until your speed increases. Gradually complicate the task and take larger texts, even entire books. Gradually, you will notice that your reading speed has actually increased.
Second exercise
This exercise is performed in many speed reading trainings. But you can make it at home too. It's called "Pyramid" appearance a tablet that serves for training and which really resembles a pyramid.
The essence of the exercise is to read the numbers on the “slopes” of the pyramid, while not taking your eyes off the numbers located along the central axis. This exercise helps you learn two things at once. important skills: concentration and reading whole lines, when the eye does not glide over the line, but snatches it all from the text. With this type of reading, the eyes move vertically rather than horizontally, and the reading speed increases significantly. Test yourself, see how many numbers you can read.
Third exercise
With its help, you will train the speed of searching for words, which is no less important for speed reading. One of its principles is orientation by reference words. After all, in many texts the information content turns out to be quite low, and the most important information is for a long time search.
To complete this exercise, you will need someone from your social circle. Choose a thick book that you haven't read, and have your assistant find a sentence, read it to you and remember for yourself where it was (page and approximate line). Next, take this book yourself and find this sentence as quickly as possible. Repeat until sentences begin to appear at a noticeably increased speed. Change the book periodically. You will also gradually train your memory: after all, you will gradually begin to navigate the book, remembering what is on what page. This can be another exercise for memory development.
Fourth exercise
This exercise aims to extract important information from the text. Think of a word, noun, adjective or verb, and look for it throughout the text from beginning to end. You can emphasize the right words, and then recheck yourself and see how many words you missed.
Fifth exercise
It all works for the same purpose: filtering information. It is very convenient to do this for those who speak a foreign language, but if you only understand your native language, it will also work. Take newspaper article. Maybe a small one for the first time, and run your eyes through it, finding foreign words, the meaning of which you vaguely understand or do not understand at all. This way you learn to find new information, which is important. Words whose meaning you don’t know, write them down and look them up in the dictionary. In fact, you kill two birds with one stone: learn to read quickly and replenish vocabulary.
Reading is not only an exciting activity, but also a certain obligation for a person. Thanks to the ability to read, a person receives maximum information in his life - determines the format of the store, the composition of the product, learns about the diagnosis and much more.
The question of how to learn to read quickly is considered in childhood, but for an adult this skill or familiarization with it turns out to be important. Next, we will consider ways to read quickly, because reading quickly means doing more and learning more.
The Importance of Speed Reading
The technique of reading quickly is called speed reading. Why is it necessary in principle? The fact is that a person acquires new knowledge only under the condition of visible perception.
More than 95% of the information entering the human brain is provided by the ability to see.
At the same time, reading important information that is necessary to achieve your goal is no exception.
Imagine the situation: you are in trouble legal nature, and only brochures with the Criminal, Tax, Labor or Civil Codes of the Russian Federation are helpful. It is unknown which book to look for the information you are interested in, and the time to solve the problem is limited. What to do in such a situation?
In this case, the untrained brain will not find the necessary answer to the questions, and even if it does, it will not be able to perceive it to the proper extent. As a result, the problems that arise will only get worse.
Experts say that a person who not only reads a lot, but also masters speed reading techniques:
- self-confident;
- has adequate self-esteem, somewhat self-critical, which is also only useful in most situations;
- achieves the goals set for itself.
Such statements are not groundless - for this purpose experts various systems conducted numerous studies. They came to the conclusion that it is possible to obtain a decent education in life only with the help of a large number of books read.
An educated person can always find a job he likes and with good material support. Successful man strives for self-improvement, which is also achieved by reading certain updated literature.
Get necessary information can only be obtained from newspapers or other sources that must not only be read, but read quickly. People with speed reading skills learn new things faster.
Why is a person slow to read?
Even special speed reading exercises do not always help achieve the desired result. There are certain reasons in which speed reading techniques are “useless.” These include:
- low vocabulary– the problem can be resolved by reading interesting literature (artistic or scientific);
- lack of proper concentration on the text- V in this case the problem is explained by weak articulatory apparatus which is easy to train with special exercises;
- untrained memory– can be developed only through constant reading of books and discussion or simple recollection of what has been read;
- complex content of the book– not always a child or even an adult can perceive a confusing plot or large number complex sentences in the text;
- constant return to a certain word– often in the text there is some unknown word, it needs to be clarified.
Explaining the complex and unknown word in the text should occur by parents if a child reads and wonders. Otherwise, you should contact explanatory dictionary or the Internet.
The whole truth about speed reading. Video:
Basic tricks for speed reading
Learning to speed read should begin with studying the basic points in technology. Such basics include the following:
- You need to read only useful books. If you want to become successful, then you should choose the autobiographies of talented entrepreneurs and so on.
- Choose books only with easy-to-understand presentation– these include manuscripts modern authors. Classics in this case will be inappropriate, since the text will contain a large number of already outdated words.
- The selected book must be read quickly 2 times. The first time is an introduction to the information, and the second time is a speed reading technique.
- Read only in places that are convenient for you– preferably at home and at least 1-1.5 hours without interruption for important matters.
- You should not read a work you don’t like, as well as “unnecessary”— a person who wants to succeed should not start reading science fiction.
These are just the main points that will help you master speed reading at home. Next, you should study the subtleties in the technique.
Speed reading techniques
In fact, speed reading is a complex of numerous techniques that are used to master the skill.
The methods are divided into groups - intended for children or adults. If we talk about adults, we can highlight following methods mastering speed reading:
- Reading a book from beginning to end, and then vice versa– from end to beginning. In this case, it means the ability to increase reading speed.
- Reading diagonally– the technique is very interesting, but reading diagonally helps in quickly flipping through books. This method is mainly used in the study of fiction.
- Driving your finger along the bottom of the line– this method is also used in studying reading techniques in preschool age. Explained similar help in concentration.
- Appropriation technique– is based on highlighting key words in the text, which are no longer read, but are perceived.
- Empathy technique– it is important to visualize the main character of the book, to feel him. The presented actions make it easier to perceive the text being read.
There is also an interesting method on how to quickly read books. The method is called simply: “Assault method”. It is used by intelligence officers when they need to understand and assimilate a large amount of information. The method is to use a book of scientific literature.
The volume of the book is at least 100 pages. The technique is preliminary preparation pages - it is necessary to draw strictly in the middle on each page vertical line pencil.
The presented technique is taught individual, but anyone can master it.
You can also read special books on speed reading - these are the works of numerous specialists who offer various methods and ways to improve reading speed. Everyone will find the most interesting option for themselves, which will help to a greater extent.
How to learn to quickly and better remember what you read? Video:
On the importance of reading comprehension
It is not enough to know how to learn speed reading; you need to perceive quickly read information, which is not easy to achieve.
Firstly, you just need to learn how to extract useful information from the text read. This helps you perceive the meaning of what you read much faster.
Secondly, It is important to use the understood information in practice - in this case, a person begins to use speed reading to his advantage. Similar activities and basics go in comparison to studying foreign languages– if there is no practice, the memorized words will quickly be forgotten.
Highlight following rules How to learn to read quickly and remember what you read:
- Talk about what you read acquaintances and friends.
- Take notes as you read– it is necessary to highlight phrases or entire paragraphs that are important to you.
- Read only during hours of intense brain activity– depending on the type, a person is divided into “night owl” or “lark”. You should choose the time when your brain is most active.
- Never read out loud– this distracts from the perception of information.
- It's important to focus on reading– if a person is tormented more than important events, it will be much more difficult to perceive and remember information.
How to teach a child to read quickly and correctly?
Speed reading for children also exists, and the technique should be used as soon as the baby is ready to learn the skill. In the future, this will help you quickly and easily perceive information received at school.
When to start training?
A child should be taught to read only after a full and independent analysis of his condition. A child is ready to learn if the following points are present:
There is more useful information here.
- The baby speaks fully– he can speak in whole sentences, uses uncommon words in a conversation with an adult.
- He has a developed phonemic awareness - does the baby perceive words well by ear, can he name the initial and last letter in the word spoken to him.
- The baby has no problems with hearing or pronunciation– all sounds in the child’s speech are delivered, the correct tempo of sentences is maintained ( the child focuses on keywords in a sentence).
- The child can freely navigate in space– he has a well-developed vestibular apparatus, he knows the concepts of “left”, “right”, “up” and “down”.
It turns out that teaching a child to read and teaching him speed reading techniques is possible only if there are no developmental problems. You should not start training in early age, if the baby is not interested in this, the work will not bring the desired results, and training may generally “get stuck”.
Step by step instructions
To instill in a child speed reading skills ( It is not fully recommended to teach him this technique in preschool age), you need to do the following steps:
Determine which technique is easier for him - and use it at first. As speed reading develops, change the methods with more complex options.
