Posted by John Laing on 07 30th, 2010 | no responses

Things You Did Not Know About Speed Reading Exercises

Speed reading exercises have for a goal to increase the speed of reading without adversely changing the memory of understanding of the text. There are numerous ways of speed reading but the main idea is to maintain a balance between comprehension and the speed of reading. It must be noted that this process requires a lot of practice.

There exists a few different ways to speed read like not pronouncing all of the words, speeding up word recognition so that focus on every individual letter is not necessary and generally scanning over the text. Different ways will come naturally to different people and these will reveal themselves with time and practice. As a general idea, getting your eyes to accelerate their movement and speeding up word recognition.

Skimming is the way a reader can search visually through a text for clues to what the meaning of the article might be. In general, skimming is not considered the most effective method for texts that are denser in information because it doesn’t lead to a great comprehension. Oppositely, this method is effective to grasp the essential meaning of a text.

Meta guiding is another way of speed reading and may be the most popular to speed up your reading process. In meta guiding, the reader has to guide the eyes along the lines of text by following a pointer in the form of a pen or a finger. This following forces the eyes to speed up and discourages subvocalization.

A basic speed reading exercise consists of using your finger to pace yourself through a text and accelerate the rate at which you would normally move your eyes across a line. Moving your finger gradually faster will force your eyes to recognize words quickly and hence accelerate your speed of reading.

Another exercise to try to attempt to learn a speed reading technique consists of quickly scanning through the material to look for key words attached to the essential meaning of the sentences. In essence, this is reading in blocks and is also done in other exercises which can become more complicated.

The third exercise demands some additional setup time and small cards are necessary. The cards themselves need to have a few words written on each of them; blocks, phrases or pieces of sentences. In practicality will be to read the words on the index cards instead of reading a full text. During a few minutes, the reader must flip the cards and try to recognize the words written on each card. This will work on recognizing words to try to accelerate the process of recognizing a block of words.

In general, in order for speed reading exercises to be effective, some time must be invested. A rule of thumb is that it is recommended to have a good level of energy and have a good level of concentration to practice these exercises. To see worth while results, it takes time and lots of practice. Reading really fast is possible all the while keeping a good comprehension and retention of what is being read.

Speed reading is a great asset to have in the academic and professional world. It is rather easy to teach and learn and is absolutely free. A little patience and some determination are all that are needed along with the key speed reading exercises.

speed reading center is the best place to learn everything you want about speed reading and speed reading exercises. Learn how to increase your reading speed with few simple speed reading routines.

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