Richard Sutz

You can use speed reading to enhance both your reading ability and your reading enjoyment. Some misconceptions about the speed reading method persist — pay no attention to them. By making slight adjustments to your reading habits, especially stopping yourself from hearing or saying each word, you can move from being an average reader with average comprehension to a proficient speed-reader with excellent comprehension.

You may have some preconceived ideas about what speed reading is. Don't worry, many people have erroneous ideas about the practice of speed reading, including the myths in the following list, all of which are false: You don't enjoy reading as much when you speed read. On the contrary! Speed reading is efficient reading.

A major component of speed reading is eye fixation, a point where your eyes come to rest as you read. Readers who make fewer eye fixations read faster because they take in more words with each fixation. The number of words you can process in an eye fixation depends on your vision span, your vocabulary, and your familiarity with what you’re reading.

Speed reading is a good way to absorb a lot of printed information quickly, but sometimes you just need to get the gist of what is being written about, without all the details. That's when knowing how to skim text can be helpful. When you skim a page, you take the main ideas from the reading material without reading all the words.

Skimming — getting the essence from reading material without reading all the words — boils down to knowing what parts to read and what parts to pass by. Following are some tips and techniques for recognizing what is important to read in the act of skimming. Know what you want Before you start skimming, ask yourself what you want to get from the book or article under your nose.

Going straight to the main idea of each paragraph significantly increases your reading speed. This main idea is the paragraph's topic sentence. You don’t have to read as much to get a firmer grasp of the author’s fundamental ideas if you can find and understand a paragraph's topic sentence. The question is: How do you recognize the main idea in a paragraph amid all the details?

For your eyes to see anything, they have to be still. You can’t swing your eyes wildly around the room and expect to see anything but a blur. The same is true of reading words on a page. To see words, your eyes must be still, but they must also move left-to-right across the page to take in words in the act of reading.

Reading in clumps means taking in more than one word at a time while you read, and it's essential for speed reading. A clump is a collection of 4 to 16 adjacent words that you read in a single glance. When you read in clumps, you naturally increase your speed because you can’t slow down to vocalize (speak or hear the words as you read them).

The following speed reading test establishes your starting rate so you can see how fast a reader you are and how much you improve in the course of your speed-reading studies. For this test, read without adopting any speed-reading principles you may have already read about; read as though you don’t know anything about speed reading.