How to Improve Your Reading Speed Immediately

Read this lesson only after you have finished reading previous lessons. Please do this test after you have practiced pacer for at least 2 days.
 
In this lesson, I will share few guidelines you must follow to test your reading speed. Make sure you follow these guidelines every time you read from now. Most of the ideas shared in this lesson are pure common sense but not usually used. I am expecting your reading speed will increase, by at least 50%.

Guidelines:

• Have your vision checked. 
  It is absolutely essential that you wear proper prescribed glasses if you need them while reading. Your reading speed and experience gets worse, if you have eyesight but you don’t wear glasses or you wear glasses with wrong prescription. If you don’t wear glasses but feel your vision is blur, then get your vision checked.
• Select a quiet environment:
  To read at your best, it is better to read in a quiet room and with as few distractions as possible. To have comfortable reading experience take care of the following:

  a. Lighting
  Be sure that lighting is bright and conducive to reading. Both dark lighting and glaring light make it difficult to read and not good.

  b. Chair.
  Choose a chair that’s comfortable and upright. It is always better to read sitting on a chair rather than lying down.

   c. Remove distractions.Before you start reading, remove eliminate anything that could distract your like unnecessary material on desk, put your mobile on silent mode etc.

3. Break your book in.Certain mechanical considerations are extremely important in increasing your reading speed, and one of the most important is preparing a book so that it's easy to handle.

Breaking in makes page-turning much easier and also helps preserve the book in good condition.  It's essential, especially when the student moves into very high-speed reading, for the book to lie flat on the desk or in the hands, and for the pages to turn easily. Otherwise, you may inadvertently cut hundreds of words per minute off your reading speed.

To break in a book, place it on your desk or another flat surface so that it rests on its spine, on the binding. Then open both the front and back covers slowly, until they rest fiat on the  table. Continue to hold up the pages of the book, at right angles to the table.) Allow a few pages from each side of the book to flop down toward the desk, and run your thumb or a finger down the inner margin, against the inner  binding,  to flatten the pages out. Continue  this flattening process until the entire book is open on the table, parted approximately midway through the pages. Then flip through the upper  and lower corners of the pages of the book, as you would through  a deck of cards, to make them more flexible for page-turning.

4. Become an active page-turner. Use what I have taught in previous lesson for turning the pages. If you are using right hand as a pacer then, use your left hand to turn pages.

5. Use pacer and the underlining hand motion. Use Pacer and the underlining hand motion as taught in video in the previous lesson.  This is very important. With underlining hand motion, you move your hand from left to right across the page under the line of type you’re reading,  as though  you were drawing  a line underneath the words.
6. Don’t regress or progress as you read. Remember the first bad habit, Wasted Eye Movement - Regressions and Progressions. While you are doing this test, make sure you don’t regress or progress while reading.  Just go with the flow. If you feel, if you have missed out something, don’t worry, you can revisit that later. 

 Time to test your reading speed:

Till now you have learnt about myths and misconceptions about reading, bad habits of reading. It is the right time to test your reading speed again.  While you are reading make sure you apply what you have learnt from lesson 1 and keep these guidelines in mind:  

1. Select a quiet environment
2.  Break your book in.
3. Become an active page-turner.
4. Use pacer and the underlining hand motion.
5. Don’t regress or progress as you read.

Test your reading speed on a physical book and not on any electronic device. There is a high probability that your reading speed has shown an increase. I want you to share your increase in speed and other observations you may have noticed during the process in your journal.

Action Step:

Test your reading speed keeping the above guidelines in mind and share your new reading speed below. Also share what your start reading speed was and what was your experience while reading this time when compared with last time.
I look forward to reading your success story.

Troubleshooting

Did you reading speed reduced after taking this test? If yes, read further…

I have coached 100s of students with this system and in the same order. Almost all of them has increased their reading speed. Few students do realize; their reading speed hasn’t increased or has reduced. The major reason why the students reading speed hasn't increased is because they normally have wrong expectations and become conscious of what they are reading. 

After gaining the knowledge, they expect that their reading speed to increase and in the process they end up doing what they shouldn't do.

Most important of all, when you are reading, 100% of your focus should be on the book and nothing else.  There should be no distractions either physically or mentally.  When I am reading a book, I take 10-15 minutes to clear out any distractions (put phone in silent, remove all the unnecessary material from desk, relax my mind (to reduce mental chatter etc).

See what one of my previous students wrote : “ I also think that the main thing that's slowing me down is sub vocalization”. 

From this sentence, I can deduce that some part of his brain is thinking, - I am sub-vocalising while reading -leading to mental distraction and not able to concentrate 100% on book he is reading.  After practicing speed reading for years, I still sub-vocalise when I read. Don't expect you won’t sub vocalize when you are reading. (even if you have done lot of practicing). When you are reading, you'll sub-vocalize and make a mental note of it.

If your reading speed has decreased or not shown any improvement

Let’s analyse what might have gone wrong. Answer these basic questions:

1. Did you use pacer? Did using pacer become a habit? Does it feel natural to use it?
2.  Were you think of your bad reading habits while doing this test?
3. What was your level of concentration while taking the test?
4. Were you conscious of yourself and your reading while taking this test?
5. Did you see this as a test to score or as normal reading?
6. What were your expectations before and while taking this test?
7. While reading with pacer, did you feel like you are reading faster or like you were reading slower? Did you feel anything different while reading with pacer?
8. Which book did you select to take the test? is it more technical than the one you selected before?

~Srinivas Reddy