I need help. How do I become a faster reader?

Post Reply New Topic

There are too many books I want to read and my reading abilities are too low. By 'too many' books I don't mean like hundreds or thousands of books, more like four or five dozens of some of the better books that have ever been written. For most normal people, reading that amount of books is not a great challenge; for me it is. Let me give you a quick summary of the problems I encounter when reading, especially when reading books:

> Poor concentration/short attention span: if I like what I am reading, my imagination goes wild, thinking about the subject matter. If I don't like what I am reading, my imagination goes wild, thinking about something else.

> Forgetting the stuff I read: meaning that I often overlook the details and end up with only a memory of the general outline of the story, which is often distorted.

> Low processing abilities: sometimes I read something and only absorb sequences of words that don't form sentences. When that happens, I have to reread sentences until they make sense.

> Poor retention: I can't hold or repeat long sentences in my head.

> Slow reading: if I try to read faster, I don't understand a thing.



Those are a few examples of the problems I encounter when reading books. I am not sure how I'll ever read Les Miserables and The Count of Monte Cristo, though I plan to. The last time I read a book longer than 500 pages, the only book I have read longer than 500 pages, I spent almost 4 months.

Does anyone have any tips to improve my reading abilities? At my age - mid twenties - I shouldn't be reading the way most 9 year olds do.

How often do you read? When I barely read books I wasn't as fast as I am now. I have the problem with re-reading sentences too and getting distracted.
Try reading simple books fast, like a kids book 'A Series of Unfortunate Events.' Just something with easy words to see if it will actually make you read faster and you'll still understand what you've read.
Do you have reading glasses? It might be easier to read with them on.
Do you have any light sensitivity? Do words blur? Do you read them in the wrong order?
Is it possible to stop imagining things when you're reading? I usually just try to shake the thoughts from my head.
You might need to find a very quiet place to read. I usually retreat to a very quiet place to read, while there's a bit of noise in my house. Fortunately there's an ideal spot in a granny flat in my backyard.
How about meditation? Sit for a few minutes and try to not think about things.

I had a speed reading class in high school. One thing we learned to do is skim and retain information that way. I picked out something like three words a sentence.
It's awkward at first but if you practice it gets easier.
Another thing we did was look at an entire paragraph at once instead of focusing on one word at a time.
Like I said, strange at first but if you practice it get's easier.
We spent our classtime reading a chapter and timing how fast it took to read it. You can time yourself. My fave book in that class was The Shining. I read the classroom copy every class.
What you should do, like pensi typed, is read a lot. Spend a lot of time reading your fave novels. The more you practice reading, the faster you will get and the better your retention will be. Make sure you have great light or a lamp nearby to keep eyestrain to a minimum.

With Les Miserable. Watch the movie, then read the book.
Another thing you can try. Get a copy of the Cliff Notes. Those are great! It's like cheating but it gives you this outline.

Reading simpler material will not help you. Challenge your brain or your abilities will never improve. There's nothing wrong with having to back up and reread paragraphs if you didn't process it adequately the first time. If you keep at it, you'll find that material you can barely comprehend now, will seem light and simple a year from now. And your ability to focus and control the 'wandering mind' will improve as well.


The speed-reading tricks of scanning groups of words or even entire paragraphs are handy for quick study to pass tests. If you practice them faithfully, you can come away from most material with a high degree of comprehension and short-term retention - my experience, though, was that what I learned didn't stay with me very well over the long term. And speed reading sucks for enjoying good fiction. It's like watching an entire movie in fast forward. You may follow the story well enough to know basically what happened, but you won't enjoy it.

Excuse me Sir - how do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, My boy, practice!

You can try reading two sentences at a time at first. It's been a few years since that speed reading class, I think my skills could use a review.
I've gotten out of the habit but it would be good for me to start practicing again. That's why I want to find a good book, to refresh me on any tips I may have forgotten.
What you do is look at the paragraph and try to read it all at once. It sounds impossible because we all have been taught to read one way and that's not the way, but it can be accomplished. It's just another way of reading.
If you try it several times and concentrate on reaching a goal of glancing at the paragraph and then reciting what was in the paragraph after glancing at it, it gets easier. It's like any other skill, the more you hone it, the better it becomes.

I also found interesting links.

This one is a speed reading lesson online. It's kind of easy because it's just one sentence but you only get to see it for a split second, then you get to answer a multiple choice question about what a specific word is. It's kind of cool because you can practice reading really quickly.
You can copy and paste this in your browser if you don't want to click it:

http://eslus.com/LESSONS/READING/SPDREAD/1/INTRO1.HTM

This is the link for the Interlink Language Center site that has that particular exercise. This link gives you all the reading improvement exercises the site has:

http://eslus.com/LESSONS/READING/READ.HTM

Here's a link to another site called Neuro Gym:

http://www.bangor.ac.uk/~mas009/neurogym/speed.htm

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/misunderstoodminds/reading.html

You might reduce your reading list from 48 books down to perhaps 3 books which you really want to read. Read the most important books first.

Regarding reading, the only thing I've heard which can help some readers (not all readers) temporarily read faster is using a medicine (a central nervous system stimulant) for ADHD (not a cure).

Reading is a complex activity. Peoples' natural memory abilities vary widely. Some persons can read books and retain the information for almost forever. Others can read the same books and the information rapidly fades away.

Words

Reading

Paying Attention
Comprehension
Memory
Retention

Some of the stuff that works for dyslexics might help you; have you searched for information on what helps with that?

If you can find books on tape or a screen reader and digital books, that would be a way to dodge having to do the actual reading; but it would also be slower. Your call...

As far as time investment goes, you get what you pay for. I often find that enthusiastic advocates of "speed reading" generally take much less information from the text which they have skimmed over than the amount of information taken in by people who actually read the text in its entirety.

Sure, "speed reading", as in glancing quickly over every paragraph, will get you a general idea of what's in a book, and anyone who speed reads instead of reading books properly will assume that they have absorbed all there is to absorb, since they're simply not used to going into further detail and have no idea about the depth of information which they're actually missing. They think that what they read during their quick glance is somehow comparable to what a more thorough and slow reader would have taken from the same book.

They're not even close to doing the same though, it is as you would expect. One is flicking through pages and looking for words of interest, skipping everything else to save time, while the other is reading the book.

Speed reading is very useful but all it will actually do is help you more quickly find specific parts of a book which you can then read more thoroughly, ignoring the bulk of it which is of less interest, while also potentially causing you to miss some ideas which may have been of interest as well. It won't help you read the book in its entirety. Anyone who attempts to convince you otherwise is a very shallow reader who just wants their quick glances to be held alongside someone else's in-depth studies, and is either being pretentious or is fooling their self.