The question of how to quickly read a book is especially relevant for students and people whose profession is associated with large amounts of information. In rare general education schools, they teach to read quickly and efficiently, therefore, as a rule, people fill in the missing skill at a later age. The average reading speed of a Russian person is from 150 to 200 words per minute (for comparison: in the USA, the average speed is 300 words per minute due to the peculiarities of the English language). These figures can be increased four to five times with almost no effort.
First workouts
You should always start with the basics, and besides, they will be useful if you need to read a book urgently. How to read a book in 1 hour without knowing speed reading? Of course, you can’t cope with a large work without long preliminary training, but you can quite master a medium-sized book in this time period, it’s enough to get rid of simple mistakes.
During the first lesson of any speed reading course, you will be taught about how human vision works, because these features are associated with a wastetime while reading. By simply avoiding these mistakes, you can already increase your reading speed by several times.
Exercise
Take a book containing at least two hundred pages, a pencil or a pen. You will also need a timer. Place the book in front of you so that it does not close. If necessary, press the pages or develop the spine, in a word, make sure that you do not have to hold it with your hands. You will need at least twenty minutes to complete the lesson. Minimize external stimuli: turn off the phone, warn the household that you are busy.
So, what is the secret of speed reading? How to read 8 times faster?
First, you need to make as few stops as possible when reading. The fact is that a person's eyes move spasmodically through the text. At the end of each jump, attention is fixed on a part of the line. Each such stop lasts from a quarter to a half second. Many do not notice these stops, but the easiest way to follow them is not on the text, but on a straight line. Many speed reading tutorials give this experiment: draw a line on a piece of paper, then close one eye, lightly holding the eyelid with your fingertips, with the other eye "walk" along this line from left to right. Simply changing from a hopping motion to a smooth one, or reducing stops can double or triple your reading speed.
Returns in text
Another common mistake is constantlyrereading of the already read part of the text. Why is this happening? One of the reasons is lack of concentration. A person in the process of reading begins to think about third-party things, so the information from the text in the memory is "not deposited", and he has to re-read the piece again. Sometimes the subconscious of the reader independently returns him to the place where the concentration has decreased. Therefore, if you are interested in how to quickly read a book, then take the advice of many scientists: concentrate on what you are doing.
Split workouts
Another trick to speed reading is developing your peripheral vision. As a rule, people use the central focus, and this reduces the reading speed by half.
During the exercises, do not try to develop all the skills at once. In the technique of fast reading with high memorization, the main thing is consistency. Each exercise is aimed at improving a certain skill, so when training speed, do not pay attention to the quality of memorization, because this will be your task in other exercises.
It's important to give yourself extra work. That is, if you are now reading 150 words per minute, and want to read 300, then train at a speed of 900. As mentioned above, when training for speed, do not concentrate on memorizing the text well.
Two-minute exercise
First, grab a pencil or pen to use to hold focus. Place the tip under the line and smoothly guide it as you read,look at the tip of the pointer. This exercise is aimed at minimizing jerks and stops. Set the tempo with the tip of the pencil. So you will get rid of constant returns in the text.
Try to go through the line in one second, and with each new page increase this figure. In no case do not stop and do not dwell on the line for more than one second, even if you cannot understand what the sentence is about or have completely lost the course of events. At the end, count how many words you managed to read.
Second stage
Continue the previous exercise, and again using the timer, go through two lines in one second. It’s not scary if you don’t understand anything from the text, because at this stage it doesn’t matter: you train your perception, teach your eyes to move with the least loss of time. Read at this pace for three minutes, remembering to concentrate on the tip of the pencil.
The fastest reading
In almost every speed reading course, you can hear questions about how to learn to read diagonally. In fact, this is not a completely correct term, because in fact it is not necessary to read diagonally. The whole secret is that the reader must have very well-developed peripheral vision, due to which he covers with his eyes not one word or phrase, but a whole line (or even several) at once, due to which he can read it in a matter of seconds by simply looking through the page. seconds.
To move on to such reading, you first need to break all the labels of perception: repetitions in the text, loss of concentration, sharp eye jumps, mental pronunciation of what is read, and peripheral vision training is also required. This is easy to do using the Schulte table. It looks like columns of numbers that are centrally located in the middle. The essence of the method is that a person must look at the central column, and with peripheral vision look for identical blocks in the outer columns. Here you do not need to concentrate on recognizing the meanings of the numbers, the main thing is to see the same ones. Another tip: if the task seemed too difficult, just try to look from a greater distance.
Diagonal reading can be called the pinnacle of speed reading, so if you are thinking about how to quickly read a book and are ready to make an effort to master the exercises, then this technique is for you.
One of the main features of Diagonal Reading (also known as PhotoReading) is total immersion in the process. This requires a high degree of concentration, cleansing the brain of unnecessary thoughts, because if you get a little distracted, you will have to resort to a return. Among other things, the ability to structure information, to find the most important thing in the text is important. An experienced reader easily separates the "water" from the grains of information and follows them only.
Memorization
You learned how to quickly read a book, but why do you need it ifall the knowledge gained will fall out of memory in a few days? Only a few people have a phenomenal ability to memorize, the rest need training, and in the case of reading, this is not a memory exercise. Reading this or that book, it is necessary to learn to see its structure, to highlight the main thing. To do this, you can use a pencil, noting the main thing, because in almost every text there is a lot of "water" - extra information that the author adds for better understanding. So why read it if you get the point from the first sentence? Just highlight it.
After you've finished reading, review everything that's underlined. Surely you can find "water" among your notes. Exclude her. For some people, these two steps will be enough for a good memorization, but if you need to memorize the text with the highest quality, copy everything that you have underlined into a notebook, you can also use any of the mnemonics. For example, the "Memory Palace" technique, which became very popular after the release of the series "Sherlock".
