Before you can learn how to speed read, you need to determine your average reading speed. Your average reading speed is the number of words you can read per minute, or wpm (words per minute). The speed of a five year old child is in the 150 wpm range. The average speed of an adult doesn’t get any larger than that at 250 wpm. The reason for this is because along the way, we pick up a lot of bad habits that slow down our reading speed, like sub-vocalization and back skipping. With speed reading exercises, you can eliminate these bad habits and increase your average speed by as much as 1,000 wpm or more.
To find out what your average speed is, you will need to find out what your wpm rate is. Grab a simple text and count the number of words on the first three lines. Let’s say that there are 33 words on those lines. Divide this number by three to obtain the average words per line. Count the number of lines in the page (let’s say that there are 40 lines) and multiply this number by the average words per line. In this example, there are 440 words per page. Do the same for the next four pages. Get your timer and hit start as soon as you begin reading. Once you’ve read the four pages, multiply the number of pages you read by its word per page. For instance, 440 words per page times 4 pages is 1760 words read. Divide this by the time it took you to read it. Let’s say it took you five minutes. 1760 divided by 5 is 352, your average reading speed.
There are a number of things you can do to increase your average reading speed. Do you find yourself having to vocalize the words as you read? This is called sub-vocalization, a bad habit that slows down a person’s average reading speed because we speak slower than we can read. Try to be aware of what you do when you read, and catch yourself when you start sub-vocalizing. Another bad habit that keeps an adult’s average reading speed low is back skipping. This is when you go back to reread words or sentences you might have glossed over. When you read, try to make sure you understand the word or block of words that you read before moving on to the next.
If you would like to increase your average speed, a good target would be 500 – 800 wpm. Once your average reading speed is in the 500 wpm range, you’ll notice that you can read larger quantities of words in shorter amounts of time. Of course, make sure that you can comprehend everything that you read! Remember, speed reading is useless if you don’t understand what you’re reading.
You can easily increase your average reading speed by reading every day, or by enrolling for a speed reading course. Try working on it by yourself before you sign up for a class.
AUTOPOST by BEDEWY VISIT GAHZLY
