7 Science Backed Speed Reading Tips

October 11, 2024

Just starting your speed reading journey? Don’t know where to start?

Use these 7 tips below!

Disclaimer:

Reading is like juggling. A complex act that not everyone is good at. With reading, there are many things going on at the same time. To become a better reader, we must train one ball at a time.

Man throwing books upward — When you successfully train your reading muscle properly, expect to see amazing results including boosted reading comprehension, memory, and reading speed!

1. Use a Pacer as You Read: Use your pointer finger or a pen to guide your eyes left to right as you read. Science has shown that skilled, fast readers are rhythmic readers, so we want your reading to flow and move naturally across the page.

Book with highlighted text — Guiding your eyes is very important.

Before you started using this technique, did you know your brain has been tricking you? (If you haven’t noticed this already) Your eyes are not moving smoothly across the page at all. Your eyes jump around on the page! You will learn basic to advanced hand movements and train them.

2. Stop Reading Out Loud:

You need to stop reading out loud, stop sounding out each individual word, and make the voice in your head quieter.

I am not saying completely eliminate the voice in your head.

Subvocalization is the habit of silently pronouncing each word in your head as you read. You want to reduce this habit, because you can process the words without internally vocalizing them. Psychologist Edmund Burke Huey, Keith Rayner, and Alexander Pollatsek noticed this with skilled readers.

Psychologists and Neuroscientists study how the brain reads, and the relationship with reading and sounding everything out loud. On page 190 of “The Psychology of Reading”, the black book, “..we can read silently much faster than we can read aloud.”

Sample Electromyographic recordings — Reading scientists use EMG, (Electromyographic recording) to determine how much someone sounds out their reading. The more EMG activity a reader has, the more they are sounding out what they read.

“Beginning readers show more EMG activity than skilled readers.” (Psychology of Reading, p 192)

“..the amount of EMG activity decreases as reading skill increases.”(Edfeldt 1960)

“Poor readers also show more EMG activity than do good readers.”(Edfeldt 1960)

3. Learn “Chunking”: Instead of focusing on each word individually, speed readers capture more words at once. This allows them to take in larger chunks of text with each glance, increasing reading speed.

4. Expanding Peripheral Vision: To make chunking easier, speed readers often use techniques to expand their field of vision to encompass more words at once. Athletes use peripheral vision training for sports, so why not use it for reading!

5. Reducing Fixations: Fixations are brief pauses that occur when your eyes stop on a word or phrase. Speed reading techniques aim to minimize these fixations, allowing the eyes to move more smoothly across the page.

6. Read Ahead: Ready to boost your reading comprehension, speed, and motivation? Quickly scan ahead and look at what you plan to read. This confuses the mind, since you’ll only read parts of chapters, and look at some graphs and images. You’re creating open loops in your mind, generating questions your brain now wants the answer to. This is the ‘P’ in PQRST, Preview. Just like a race car driver studies the race track before a race and anticipates every turn and knows where the finish line is, you will be doing the same with your books.

P - Preview, Q - Question, R - Read, S - Summarise, T - Test

7. Stop backtracking. Minimizing regression, or backtracking, can improve reading efficiency and speed. If you must backtrack, backtrack to key bolded points that remind you of the structure, reinforcing high level comprehension.