Each of us reads differently. Someone taking his time, stretching out the pleasure, pronouncing the words to himself. Someone drunkenly, insatiably, practically “swallowing” books and constantly updating their library. The speed of reading a person is determined by many factors - from the activity of mental processes and character to the characteristics of thinking.
But not everyone knows that this speed can be increased by 2-3 times.
We will tell you how to do it.
How to determine the initial reading speed - test
Most often, to determine the speed of reading, they use by the following formula:
Q (number of characters in the text, no spaces) divided by T (number of minutes spent reading) and multiplied by K (comprehension rate, that is, assimilation of the text read) = V (characters/min).
Reading time is, of course, measured with a stopwatch.
And as for the meaningfulness of reading, this coefficient is determined through the analysis of the answers received to 10 questions on the text. With all 10 correct answers, K is equal to 1, with 8 correct answers, K = 0, etc.
For example , you spent 4 minutes reading a text of 3000 characters, and only 6 gave correct answers. In this case, your reading speed will be calculated according to the following formula:
V \u003d (3000: 4) x0.6 \u003d 450 characters / min. Or about 75 wpm, given that the average number of letters in a word is 6.
Speed limits:
- Less than 900 cpm: low speed.
- 1500 cpm: average speed.
- 3300 cpm: high speed.
- Over 3300 cpm: very high.
According to research, the highest speed that allows you to fully assimilate the text is 6000 characters / min.
A higher speed is possible, but only when reading-“scanning”, without understanding and assimilation of what is read.
What is the easiest way to test your book swallowing speed?
Let's do without formulas! We copy the text of any selected article, select that part of it that consists of 500 words, turn on the stopwatch and ... let's go! True, we do not read "race", but thoughtfully and in the usual way.
Have you read? Now look at the stopwatch and studying indicators:
- Less than 200 sl/min: low speed. Most likely, you accompany the reading with a mental pronunciation of each word. And you probably don't even notice how your lips move. There is nothing terrible in this. Except that you spend a lot of time reading.
- 200-300 sl/min: average speed.
- 300-450 sl/min: high speed. You read quickly (and probably a lot), without mentally pronouncing the words, and even having time to think about what you read. Excellent result.
- Over 450 sl/min: your score is "adjusted". That is, when reading, you consciously (or maybe unconsciously) use techniques or techniques to increase your reading speed.
Preparing for exercises to increase reading speed - what will you need?
By improving your reading speed using certain techniques, you will not only improve your reading efficiency, but also improve your memory performance.
And before proceeding directly to the study of technology, you should prepare as thoroughly as possible to the exercises.
- Prepare pen, stopwatch and any book with more than 200 pages.
- Take care not to distract you within 20 minutes of training.
- Take care of book holders.
7 Exercises to Increase Reading Speed
A human life is not enough to master all the masterpieces of world literature. But can you try?
To the attention of all book-eaters who do not have enough time in the day - the best exercises to improve reading technique!
Method 1st. Hands are your helpers!
Physical participation in the process of reading, oddly enough, also helps to increase speed.
How and why?
The human brain is programmed to fix movements. By using your hand or even a regular divider card while reading, you create movement on the book page and automatically enhance your concentration.
- Finger pointer. With this “pointer”, you easily and naturally, exclusively vertically, lead along the book page at a speed slightly higher than eye movement. The tempo of the pointer cannot be changed - it must be constant and stable, without returning the finger to the already read text and without stopping. Where exactly to lead with a “pointer” does not really matter. Though in the center of the text, even in the side margin.
- Separator card. Or a blank sheet of paper, folded in half for convenience. The size is about 7.5x13 cm. The main thing is that the sheet is solid, and it is convenient for you to hold and move it with one hand. Position the card above the readable line. Above, not below! In this way, you increase your attentiveness, eliminating the possibility of returning to the lines you read.
Method 2. Developing peripheral vision
Your main tool (or one of) in speed reading is your peripheral vision. With it, instead of several letters, you can read a word or even a whole line. Lateral vision training is carried out by working with the well-known Schulte table.
What is it and how to train?
Table- this is a field of 25 squares, each of which contains a number. All numbers (approx. - from 1 to 25) are located in random order.
A task: looking only at the central square, find all these numbers in descending (or ascending) order.
How to train? You can print the table for yourself on paper and use a timer. And you can train on the Internet (it's much easier) - there are enough similar services on the Web.
Having mastered the 5 by 5 diachrom table, move on to more complicated versions with colored fields and beyond.
Method 3. Unlearning subvocalization
This is one of the key principles of speed reading. “Subvocalization” refers to lip/tongue movements and mental pronunciation of words while reading.
Why does it interfere with reading?
The average number of words spoken by a person per minute is 180. With an increase in reading speed, the pronunciation of words becomes difficult, and subvocalization becomes an obstacle in mastering a new skill.
How to stop saying words to yourself?
To do this, in the process of reading ...
- Clamp the tip of a pencil (or other object) with your teeth.
- We press the tongue to the sky.
- Place the finger of your free hand on your lips.
- We count ourselves from 0 to 10.
- We mentally pronounce poems or tongue twisters.
- We put quiet music in the background and tap out the melody with a pencil.
Method 4. There is no way back!
Returning to the already read text (note - regression) and rereading the lines already passed increase the reading time of the text by 30 percent.
This can happen involuntarily, automatically - for example, if you were distracted by an extraneous sound, and you did not have time to learn a few words. Or for re-reading an overly informative phrase that you did not understand (or did not have time to understand due to the high reading speed).
How to unlearn regressions?
- Use the card, blocking access to the read material.
- Use appropriate programs on the Web (eg Best Reader).
- Use your pointer finger.
- Train your willpower and more often remember that below in the text you will most likely fill in all the information gaps that you made earlier.
Method 5th. We concentrate
It is clear that at high speeds the quality of assimilation of the material is noticeably reduced. But, firstly, this is only at first, until you have mastered the technique of speed reading, and secondly, you can pick up speed at first without losing the quality of reading.
This will help special exercises:
- Using multi-colored felt-tip pens, write the names of colors on a piece of paper in a chaotic manner. Write the word "red" in yellow, "green" in black, and so on. Put the sheet on the table for a day. Then take it out and, stopping your finger on a particular word, quickly name the color of the ink.
- We take a sheet and paper. We focus on something. For example, on that ficus in a pot. And we are not distracted by extraneous thoughts for at least 3-4 minutes. That is, we think only about this ficus! If an extraneous thought nevertheless crept in, we put a “notch” on the sheet and again focus on the ficus. We train until you have a clean slate after the exercise.
- We count by reading. How? Just. While reading, we count each word in the text. Of course, only mentally and without various "helpers" in the form of tapping with the foot, bending the fingers, etc. For the exercise - 3-4 minutes. When you finish it, be sure to check yourself - just count the words without trying to read them.
Practice until the number of words received in the process of reading and actually available is equal.
Method 6. Learning to recognize "key" words and sweep away unnecessary ones
Looking at a painting, you don't ask yourself what the artist was trying to say. You just watch and understand everything. Moreover, your view captures the whole picture at once, and not individual details.
A similar "scheme" is used here. You must learn to snatch signal, keywords from a line and cut off all unnecessary ones. Each word that does not carry a special meaning, used “for beauty” or a bunch of phrases in the text, is cut off, skipped, ignored.
Focus on keywords bearing the main informative load.
Method 7. Determining paragraph topics
How to train?
Take any book, read one of the paragraphs and try to quickly identify the topic. Next, mark 5 minutes and determine the topics of the maximum number of paragraphs in this short period. The minimum number of defined topics per minute is 5.
And a couple more tips "on the road":
- Reduce the duration of the stop on each line.
- Practice skills individually. Don't try to cover all techniques at once.
- Unlearn to run your eyes over the line - look at the entire line at once.
Is the reading speed test already ideal, or do you need to train more?
You have been working on yourself for a week (or even a month). It's time to check if you have reached the speed you were counting on, or if you need to train further.
We set a timer for 1 minute and start reading at the maximum speed, which is now possible without losing the quality of assimilation of information. We write down the result and compare it with the very first one.
If you didn’t “filon” during training, then the result will surprise you.
Certainly there is. But the main thing is the quality of the acquired information. What's the point of swallowing books if after reading nothing remains in your memory but the numbers from the stopwatch.
For further training, you can use both already learned techniques and new ones. Fortunately, there is no shortage of them today. It is enough to look into the search engine and enter the appropriate query.
Practice on different types of text:
- On torn and rotating texts.
- Texts without vowels.
- On reading up and down and backwards.
- On deconcentration and expansion of the angle of view.
- On reading first the second word, then the first. Then the fourth, then the third.
- Reading diagonally. Only the most stubborn can master this technique.
- On reading the first word in its natural form, and the second - vice versa.
- On reading only the 2nd half of the words in a line, while completely ignoring the 1st and determining this boundary by eye.
- On reading "noisy" texts. That is, texts that are difficult to read due to the presence of drawings, intersecting letters, lines, shading, etc.
- Reading upside down texts.
- On reading "through the word." That is, jumping over one word.
- On reading words that remain visible when some kind of stencil is applied to the page. For example, pyramids or Christmas trees. After reading everything that the pyramid could not hide, you should re-read the text and find out if you understood the meaning correctly.
- On reading only those 2-3 words that are in the middle of the line. The remaining words (right and left) are read with peripheral vision.
Practice daily. Even 15 minutes of practice a day will help you significantly increase your reading pace.
True, then you will have to learn to slow down this pace when you want to calmly rustle the pages of your favorite book while lying in a hammock.
But that's a completely different story...
Have you used exercises to increase your reading speed? Did the ability to read quickly come in handy in later life? Share your experience in the comments below!
In our time, the most acute problem is the lack of time. The pace of life and the amount of information has increased significantly.
Especially the issue of speed reading is acute for students.
In our time, there are many methods and techniques for speed reading. They can be found not only on the Internet but also in courses.
The person who wants increase reading speed keep in mind the following things:Dynamic reading- this is a set of tricks that allow you to significantly increase the speed of reading a person without a significant loss of understanding of the article read. By the way, it should be borne in mind that there is no clear division between "slow" and fast methods of information perception for the reason that most readers use reading exercises that are suitable for them.Basic Speed Reading Techniques
|
Your gaze should cover the entire text, not small areas. It should be extensive, covering as much information as possible;
Always follow the main rule of reading diagonally: start from the upper left corner and move to the lower right, stopping at key phrases;
Learn to see the whole text without making constant eye movements, i.e. eyes should not move along the entire horizontal line of text;
Do not fix your eyes on turns of speech that do not carry any useful information. For example, "thus", "due to this", "as a conclusion ...". They are needed in order to connect key thoughts in the text, but when reading quickly, you should not pay attention to them;
If in the text you involuntarily drew attention to a word, stop at that area of information. In the future, remembering this word, you will remember all the text around it;
Follow the technique of selective reading - for a maximum of twenty seconds, you should read only a couple of lines on the page. From the words you read, formulate phrases that reveal the whole essence of the text on the page. This will save a lot of reading time;
There are plenty of courses and special programs for speed reading now. Methods may differ, but the essence of most of them is the same. First, when speed reading, you should not read words, but paragraphs, and full pages of text. This is possible if you learn to read not line by line, but vertically, along the text. Secondly, you must stop pronouncing what you read. In methods that do not interfere with internal pronunciation, additional time is spent on assimilation and memorization of the material. And the most important thing is the quality of the material read. That is, you will learn to better understand the text you read with significant time savings.
Expanding the angle of view
According to Google, there are more than 130 million books in the world today. Not all of them really deserve attention, however, a human life is not enough to read only the masterpieces of world literature, not to mention scientific, educational and other printed materials. Those who want to read more, master speed reading. T&P put together 5 exercises and programs that will help you learn how to swallow books in a day.
Development of peripheral vision
One of the main tools for speed reading is peripheral or side vision. It is carried out by the peripheral areas of the retina and allows you to see and perceive a word or even a whole line instead of several letters.
The classic way to train peripheral vision is to work with the Schulte table. Such a table is a field divided into 25 squares: five horizontally and five vertically. A number is entered in each square, in total - from 1 to 25, in random order. The student's task is to sequentially find all the numbers in ascending or descending order, while looking exclusively at the central square.
The Schulte table can be printed on paper, but today there are dynamic online generators and downloadable computer and mobile trainings, including those with a built-in timer. Those who use extensive speed reading training programs are advised to “warm up” with the Schulte table before training. If you wish, you can switch from black and white 5x5 tables to more complex versions: for example, with colored fields.
Suppression of subvocalization
Another of the cornerstone principles of teaching speed reading is the rejection of subvocalization: pronouncing words in the head and micro-movements of the tongue and lips. A person is able to pronounce an average of no more than 180 words per minute - and it is no coincidence that this number is the maximum for ordinary reading. However, when the speed of perception of the text increases, it becomes more difficult to pronounce words, and subvocalization begins to interfere with the development of a new skill.
To suppress mental pronunciation, there are several simple exercises. For example, while reading, you can press your tongue to the sky, clamp the tip of a pencil between your teeth, or even just put your finger on your lips, as if saying to yourself: “Hush.” There are also techniques in which the pronunciation of words is "knocked off" by chaotic tapping, the sound of a metronome, or music.
Refusal of regressions
Regressions in speed reading are called returns to already read parts of the text. They arise when the reader is distracted by extraneous thoughts, or if the speed of assimilation of information is too high for the brain to be able to perceive all the information.
One of the best ways to deal with regressions is the Best Reader tutorial. It is based on the dynamic selection of parts of the text on the page in black. It is difficult for human eyes to make orderly movements without observing anything, and this feature allows you to better focus your eyes on the right fragments. When reading an ordinary book or document on the screen of an electronic device, you can also use a simple trick that we all know from preschool days: swipe the page with your finger. Understanding that further text often makes it possible to fill in all the short information gaps that have arisen in the process of reading helps to get rid of regressions.
Concentration of attention
Fast reading requires a high concentration of attention. To develop it and not read the texts superficially, there are several exercises. For example, you can use a sheet on which the names of colors will be printed in color, but in such a way as to confuse the reader. The word "yellow" will be written in red letters, the word "red" in blue, and so on. For practice, you need to name the color of the ink, not the word that is written on the sheet, and at first it is quite difficult to do this.
For another exercise, you only need a blank sheet of paper and a pen. You need to focus your attention on some subject and not be distracted from it by extraneous thoughts for two or three minutes. Every time extraneous thoughts arise, it is necessary to make a note on the sheet. Over time, such marks should become less, and after that they will completely disappear.
You can also train your concentration while reading: just count the words in the text. It is important to keep counting exclusively in your mind, without helping yourself with your fingers, tapping your foot, etc. After two or three minutes, you need to stop and check yourself by counting the words without reading them. At first, the first result will differ from the second, but with regular training, the differences between them will quickly become minimal.
Reading whole words
The Spritz app also aims to develop peripheral vision. For training, only one line is used here, on which words with a highlighted red letter in the middle appear at different speeds. In this way, one can learn to perceive words without reading them from beginning to end, but at once in their entirety. This allows you to save up to 80% of the time that is normally spent on eye movements, and increase the reading speed to 500-1000 words per minute.
On the official website of the application there is a demo version of Spritz, including in Russian. You can choose from 250 to 600 wpm and other languages: English, German, Spanish and French. In the future, the developers plan to create not only a version for websites and smartphones, but also an option for use within the interface of electronic glasses, smart watches and other compact devices, because the application requires only one line to run.
It 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 almost without any 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 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 in any speed reading course, you will be told about how human vision works, because it is with these features that a waste of time is associated in the process of reading. By simply avoiding these mistakes, you can already increase your reading speed by several times.
Exercises
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 hopping to smoother or less stopping can increase your reading speed by two to three times.
Returns in text
Another common mistake is constantly rereading 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.
Separate workouts
Another trick to learning speed reading quickly is developing 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 high memorization, consistency is key. Each exercise is aimed at improving a certain skill, therefore, 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 now you are reading 150 words per minute, and you want to read 300, then train at a speed of 900. As mentioned above, when training for speed, do not concentrate on high-quality memorization of the text.
Two Minute Exercise
To begin, grab a pencil or pen to use to maintain focus. Position the tip under the line and move it smoothly 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 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 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 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. In fact, this is not quite the 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 glancing at the page. seconds.
To move on to such reading, you first need to break down all the labels of perception: repetitions in the text, loss of concentration, sharp jumps in the eyes, mental pronunciation of what has been read, and training in peripheral vision is also required. This is easy to do with 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 put in the 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 it is worth a little distraction, as you 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 goes only on them.
memorization
You have learned how to quickly read a book, but why is it necessary if all 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, a technique that became very popular after the release of the Sherlock series.
Speed reading is possible without performing a series of special exercises if you already have the skills of high concentration of attention, high-quality perception and assimilation of what you read and have an excellent memory.
Exercises for mastering the technique of speed reading will be most useful to those who are dissatisfied with their speed of understanding and remembering information when reading texts of various types and levels of complexity.
At what age can you practice speed reading?
For an adult, it is extremely important not only to be able to demonstrate the ability to read a piece of text “on a stopwatch” as quickly as possible, but the ability to save time thanks to speed reading is really necessary. Therefore, when reading a text on a particular topic, an adult simply must be able to “skip past” unnecessary, non-informative parts of the text, while catching with a glance the key words that reflect the main idea of the author.
The most common recommendation for children is that you should not teach your child to speed read before the age of 14. We agree that superficial reading “diagonally” is not the best option for students who, first of all, need to master the curriculum well and learn how to enjoy works of fiction.
Of course, each child and his abilities are unique, so it would be wise to focus on the key points of children's readiness to master the speed reading technique. So, if your child already knows how to read aloud, easily reads a page in a couple of minutes and understands the meaning of what he read (can retell the essence in his own words), you can set the task of increasing the reading speed using a set of speed reading exercises.
5 Key Skills for High Speed Reading
When learning speed reading, it is important to constantly train the following skills:
- concentration of attention;
- suppression of articulation (habits to pronounce the text);
- improved visual skill - a wide field of peripheral vision;
- the ability to quickly highlight valuable, useful information in the text and not waste attention on “water”;
- good memory - the assimilation of valuable information from the material read;
- increasing the speed of thinking.
The secret to mastering the speed reading technique is regular exercises in developing memory, attention and mastering other speed reading skills.
What exercises to improve reading speed will be useful at any age?
The greatest benefits are those exercises that eliminate the cause of the low speed of perception and processing of visual information.
The main mistakes that create a barrier in reading speed in both children and adults are considered to be involuntary recurrent eye movements (regression) and unnecessary articulation, which we learned just in childhood.
The main disadvantages that impede the effective and rapid perception of information:
- problems with concentration;
- a small angle (field) of visual coverage of textual information.
So, exercises for speed reading in grade 1 should be aimed primarily at developing the ability to concentrate and expand the scope of information. “Small field of view” is perhaps the most important reason why children are taught to read first by letter, by syllables, then by whole words, phrases and sentences with an expression confirming the reader’s understanding of the meaning of what is written.
Not every adult can boast of the ability to perceive long phrases and whole sentences “at a glance”. This is where the development of visual reading skills in most people stops.
Expanding the field of view
"Development of peripheral vision according to Schulte tables"
Regular training with the help of Schulte tables will allow your child not only to have an interesting time, but also help to increase concentration, expand peripheral vision and develop memory.
"Defocused look". The main task of training is to use a dispersed gaze to perceive a larger area of \u200b\u200bthe page or screen. The exercise can be performed in various ways, for example, to search for the same elements using scattered vision or to memorize more elements that could be covered without moving the gaze from the central object of attention.
Improving concentration
“Activation of both hemispheres”. Take the text of a topic familiar to you and read the paragraph alternately with your right and left eyes. Thanks to this simple technique, you activate both hemispheres of the brain in turn.
"Isolation of the main". Many outstanding personalities used this technique. Just take a marker or pencil and highlight the 2-3 most important thoughts from the page. It is even better to improve this exercise and not just highlight the main thing, but mark your critical remarks with signs: very important information - “!” or “NB”, agree - put “+”, disagree - “-”, etc.
"Name a Color". Call out loud as you read the following colored word color text. It is the colors, not what is written.
Red . Green. Blue. Yellow. Violet. Orange. Brown. Blue .
Red . Blue. Green. Violet. Yellow. Brown. Blue. Green. Blue.
Don't rush to do it at incredible speed. Well, if after training you, in principle, managed to complete the exercise without errors.
"Find the word". Exercise options:
- Search the page for all words starting with a certain letter.
- Search the page for all occurrences of a particular word or phrase.
Riddles- a simple and very effective way to train concentration skills at any age. Best of all, if it is or.
Getting rid of regression
“Cutting half a line”. When reading the text, cover half of the line (upper part) with a sheet of paper. Thus, you will force the brain to guess what is written and at the same time, in such a situation, it is natural to want to see the next line even before you “cut off” part of it. This exercise will teach you to jump ahead while reading and at the same time not to return to what you have read.
"Pointer". To break the habit of looking back at what you have already read, let your eyes constantly follow the pen, pencil or finger that will lead you forward all the time.
"Speed Reading". Recall the reading speed test in elementary school. We take a timer and measure our current result by reading one page, chapter or article.
Suppressing articulation
“alternate text”. In parallel with reading, we say something that is not related to the subject of attention. For example, we hum the motive of the song (“la-la-la, true-lal-la”) or say another text in our mind, for example, proverbs, tongue twisters, or keep count in order, regardless of the number of words or lines read. The main thing is not to lose concentration.
“With your mouth closed!” If your lips move or your tongue moves while reading, you need to keep them busy. This error is often present in children after constant reading aloud in the lower grades. Try simultaneously chewing on a pencil or crackers or chewing gum.
"Drumroll". We tap some kind of rhythm on the table with our fingers, the more difficult it is, the better. If the fingers are busy, the speech center of the brain will be automatically at least partially blocked.
“Reading with distracting music”. A great way to suppress the desire to pronounce readable text is to listen to music that does not have a constant rhythm. Jazz is best suited for this purpose.
We develop memory
“Non-Standard Reading”. Reading text rotated 90 degrees away from you, 180, 45, etc. An example of the exercise: turn the page upside down and set the task of reading the text backwards (i.e. from right to left). Such training is especially useful for children in order to form in memory standards of integral letters, regardless of how they are located.
"Fix the missing letters." An excellent exercise for the development of verbal-logical memory. While reading a text with missing letters, stops for “guessing” the next word are forced to keep in mind the words and the meaning of what was read earlier. A good workout not only for memory, but also for eliminating such fast reading obstacles as recurrent eye movements and articulation.
Development of the speed of thinking
One of the main reasons why it is possible to significantly improve the reading speed of any person is the redundancy of information at all levels of texts (especially those posted on the Internet), from headlines and introductory structures designed to attract attention, to individual words with a weak or completely absent semantic load.
The regular solution of logical problems develops the ability to separate the main from the secondary, develops the skill of "turning on blindness" in relation to redundant information and "instantaneous" perception of important thoughts. This is achieved, first of all, thanks to regular exercises in the speed of perception of the conditions of the problem and understanding the essence of the question being asked. A conscious analysis of the structure of tasks develops the skill of splitting tasks into conditions and groups of conditions, highlighting one or more questions, understanding the optimal order for solving subtasks, and searching for solutions.
Completing tasks from LogicLike will help at any age:
- improve concentration;
- develop the speed of thinking;
- and as a result, significantly increase the speed of reading.
