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 secondary schools they teach to read quickly and efficiently, therefore, as a rule, people fill up the missing skill at a later age. The average reading speed for a Russian person is from 150 to 200 words per minute (for comparison: in the United States, the average speed is 300 words per minute due to the peculiarities of the English language). These indicators can be increased four to five times with almost no effort.
First training
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 owning speed reading? Of course, you can’t cope with a large work without long preliminary training, but you can easily master a medium-sized book during this time period, it is enough to get rid of simple errors.
During the first lesson in any speed reading course, they will tell you how human vision works, because it is precisely these features that are a waste of time in the reading process. Just avoiding these errors, you can already increase the reading speed several times.
Exercises
Take a book containing at least two hundred pages, a pencil or pen. You will also need a timer. Lay the book in front of you so that it does not close. If necessary, squeeze the pages or develop a spine, in a word, make it so that you do not have to hold it with your hands. You will need at least twenty minutes to practice. Minimize external irritants: turn off the phone, warn the household that they 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 while reading. The fact is that the eyes of a person move in a jump-like manner throughout the text. At the end of each jump, attention is fixed to part of the line. Each such stop lasts from a quarter to half a second. Many do not notice these stops, but the easiest way to track them is not in the text, but in a straight line. Many quick-tutorial books cite this experiment: draw a strip on a piece of paper, then close one eye, gently holding the eyelid with your fingertips, with your second eye “walk” along this line from left to right. A simple change of a jerky motion to a smooth one or a decrease in stops can increase the reading speed by two to three times.
Returns in text
Another common mistake is to constantly reread the part of the text that has already been read. Why is this happening? One reason 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 delayed", and he has to re-read the piece again. Sometimes the reader’s subconscious mind returns him to the place where the concentration has decreased. Therefore, if you are interested in how to read a book quickly, then take the advice of many scientists: concentrate on what you are doing.
Separate training
Another trick in fast learning to speed reading is the development of peripheral vision. As a rule, people use a central focus, which reduces the reading speed by half.
During exercises, do not try to develop all skills at once. In high reading fast reading technique, the main thing is consistency. Each exercise is aimed at improving a specific skill, therefore, while training speed, do not pay attention to the quality of memorization, because this will be your task in other exercises.
It is important to give yourself extra load. That is, if now you read 150 words per minute, but want to read 300, then train at a speed of 900. As mentioned above, when training at a speed, do not concentrate on high-quality memorization of the text.
Two minute exercise
To get started, grab a pencil or pen to use to hold focus. Place the tip under the line and gently guide it as you read, look at the tip of the pointer. This exercise aims to minimize jerking and stopping. Use the tip of a pencil to set the pace. So you will get rid of constant returns in the text.
Try to pass the line in one second, and with each new page increase this figure. In no case do not stop and do not hold your eyes on the line for more than one second, even if you cannot understand what the proposal says or have completely lost the course of events. In the end, count how many words you managed to read.
Second phase
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 in time. Read at that pace for three minutes, remembering to concentrate on the tip of the pencil.
Fastest read
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 his eyes not just one word or phrase, but immediately a whole line (or even several), due to which he can read it in a matter of seconds by simply looking through the page seconds.
To proceed with such reading, you must first break all the labels of perception: returns in the text, loss of concentration, sharp jumps in the eyes, mental pronunciation of the read, and also requires training in peripheral vision. This is easily done 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 should look into the central column, and look with the same vision for the same blocks in the extreme columns. Here you do not need to concentrate in recognizing the values ​​of numbers, the main thing is to see the same. One more tip: if the task seemed too complicated, just try to look from a greater distance.
Diagonal reading can be called the top 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 (another name is photo reading) is a complete immersion in the process. This requires a large degree of concentration, cleansing the brain of unnecessary thoughts, because it is worth a little distraction, as you have to resort to return. Among other things, the ability to structure information and find the most important thing in the text is important. An experienced reader easily separates the "water" from the grains of information and goes only through them.
Memorization
You have learned how to read a book quickly, but why is it necessary if all the acquired knowledge fades from memory in a few days? Only a few people have a phenomenal ability to remember, while others need training, and in the case of reading, this is not an exercise in developing memory. 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 greater understanding. So why read it if you understand the idea from the first sentence? Just emphasize it.
After you finish reading, review all that are underlined. Surely you can also find "water" among your notes. Exclude her. For some people, these two steps will be enough for good memorization, but if you need to memorize the text most qualitatively, copy everything that was underlined into a notebook, you can also use any of the mnemonics. For example, the "Palace of Memory" technique , which became very popular after the release of the Sherlock series.