So the more you read, the faster you can get. What matters is how fast you can identify a word – a process that is faster when the word is more familiar. Again, we are not just limited by our vision. It’s more likely to work with a textbook than with an experimental novel.īut the good news is that there is a way of learning to read faster, and that is to practise. Of course, it all depends on the type of material you are reading. And sometimes you just need to get the gist of things, in which case strategies such as reading headings, looking for keywords, reading the first paragraph of each section and then the first sentence of subsequent paragraphs is one way through it. Sometimes all you want is to find one particular fact in a report, in which case skim reading is fine. In some situations skimming can work for the rest of us too. Is it possible that they are exceptionally good at effective skimming? If it’s so hard to find a reliable method for speeding up our eyes and our minds, it raises the question of how speed-reading champions can devour entire books in minutes rather than hours and yet still seem to understand them. In 2016, he published a paper reviewing what the latest science can tell us about attempts to speed read. He spent many years assessing the mechanisms behind some of these methods and pioneered reading-speed research by tracking eye movements. Eight ways to curb your procrastinationįor some answers, we can turn to the work of the late psychologist Keith Rayner who was at the University of California, San Diego.An effortless way to improve your memory.When it comes to hard evidence, it can be difficult to assess commercial courses and apps claiming to improve your speed-reading abilities because experiments under controlled conditions conducted by independent observers are rare. The question is how much understanding you trade in for that speed. There is no doubt that clever methods like these can help you get through the text faster. And now digital technologies have been developed, with apps that take text and then flash the words up one on the screen one at a time in rapid succession. Or methods where you learn to read several lines at a time. Or there’s meta-guiding where you use your finger to point to specific words, to keep your eyes on track without getting distracted.
The most obvious method, which we all do from time to time, is to skim read, glancing through the text and flicking through the pages to try to find the key points. There are methods dating back decades that people have tried in the hope of being able to digest a lengthy book in well under an hour.
Many of us would love to be able to read faster, yet still take everything in.
0 kommentar(er)
