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There are many books, courses and programs from which you can learn how to speed read. Whenever you pick up a book, course or software on “Learning How to Speed Read” or “Speed Reading Training”, you will come across such terms; skimming, scanning, previewing, predicting, anticipation, silent reading, reading in chunks, and guessing the meanings of unfamiliar words. Training with these can help you in acquiring a very effective compromise between fluency and accuracy in reading. Let’s see what these terms mean…
Skimming
This is one of the first techniques you will learn to use when you begin your training. Skimming means reading a text quickly, just in order to get the “gist” of the text. Skimming is a useful reading technique especially in extensive reading. So skimming enables us to extract the most relevant nouns, adjectives, and statistics from the text, so we know what we’re getting into before we really read the text.
Scanning
This means reading the text quickly in order to look for specific piece of information. You may recognize this skill as very useful in your daily life when looking for a telephone number in a phone directory or searching for the meaning of some unfamiliar word in a dictionary. Instead of reading through every word in the vicinity of the word you’re searching for, you just scan through until you find the actual word you’re looking for. This is useful in speed reading because often you will want to find the most relevant piece of information first, before you actually read the rest of the article.
Previewing
Previewing is another useful technique in learning how to speed read. This gives us the first impression about a book. We can get a fairly good preview of the book by looking at the title, the blurb on back cover, reviews, the foreword or preface, the contents page, the index etc…
Anticipation
This is a kind of guessing game in speed reading training. Anticipation means the reader is constantly anticipating what the next line or page would bring. The reader is utilizing his previous knowledge of the format of the text, and subject, and is looking forward to reading what he predicts will be in the book.
Predicting
Prediction in reading means guessing about the text in a global level or at an overall level. The difference between the anticipation and prediction is that prediction is on a higher level – you may anticipate that the conclusion will be coming up, and you may predict that after that, a certain topic will be covered. Prediction is global, at the entire book level, while prediction is local, or at a sentence level. This technique is also very useful when you want to learn how to speed read because it can increase your reading speed by several words per minute if you are ready for what you’re about to read.
Guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words
If you pay enough attention to the context, it is almost always possible to accurately guess the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Learning how to properly guess the meaning of a word is really useful when you need to learn how to speed read.
Reading in chunks
In speed reading training this technique once again enables us to avoid unnecessary concern; in this case, it’s about individual letters and word. If you pay too much unnecessary attention to the individual pieces of a phrase, instead of the phrase as a whole, your reading speed will be severely limited.
Reading in Silence
As we know, reading is a cognitive activity. The imagination of a reader is playing an active role all the time, where he is thinking, rethinking, fantasizing, or referring back. Although it is possible to read under just about any circumstances, it is always best to read in an environment as silent as possible. Reading is best as a private activity. It is very useful technique in speed reading training when you need to read large amounts of texts.
None of these techniques alone qualify as speed reading; it’s only when you combine them all that you can learn how to speed read.
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