Limit Points of Fixation While Speed Reading

Your eye must be still in order to comprehend information. As you read, it jumps quickly from point to point along the line you read. Unfortunately, much of our reading is redundant. For example, the average reader will read, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..." with the following point of focus: was, best, times, was, worst, times, was, age, wisdom, was, age, foolishness." As you may notice, this is incredibly redundant.

Your peripheral vision takes in much more than two or three words. So on the first reading stop, it picked up "It was the best..." Unfortunately, the second stop picked up, "was the best of times..." Rather, one should read the phrase selecting: best, worst, age, age. With this simple adjustment, we reduced reading time by roughly two thirds.

What types of reading reflect flexibility?

Preparation for a very difficult and unfamiliar course or for a new and complex scientific theory may demand that you read to remember everything. Here you are probably reading about 200 to 250 words per minute. You read small groups of words and frequently reread for clarification. You may find yourself mouthing the words. In these situations, you read to remember everything.

Working on a research project may demand that you read a wide range of related literature in search of possible solutions to problems or of new information to support or deny an issue. Many of the ideas in these materials will be familiar to you; in fact, ideas that appeared on one source may also appear on the other. But since you are looking for the new and different, this allows you to race rapidly over the known information and to slow down to analyze the new. Consequently, you need a strategy that allows you to efficiently tackle each document.

Spare time may allow you to relax with a good novel or a favorite magazine. Pleasure reading appears to demand very little of you. But you often carefully skim over the descriptions of the scenery to focus on the action of the main characters. Those who delight in a leisurely perusal of the Sunday morning newspaper often skip articles by noting the headlines and moving on to topics of interest.

What factors outside your control influence your speed of reading?

Background knowledge about certain has a powerful influence and helps on your reading speed. If you already know a lot about the subject of the material, you may glance at it and discard it as a waste of time. Or you may race through the reading mentally predicting what comes next. You do not reread anything because you feel confident that you understand it. No vaguely recognized words slow you down.

On the other hand, if you do not know much about the subject, you must read slowly in an attempt to absorb the new ideas and eventually locking them down together with the old information you already know.

Occasionally, vocabulary becomes the greater problem. You may have to reach for the dictionary for clarification. You may reread a sentence or a paragraph to figure out what the author is suggesting.

Another problem for people who use English as a second language is that they have the knowledge, but they don't have the English word for what they know. Also, children who have not been read to before entering school are at a disadvantage when they entire first grade and try to learn to read. They know English, but they don't know "book talk."

Written English is different from spoken English. Similarly, people who grew up speaking a different dialect or a different language often must slow down as they read to adjust to the sentence structure of written standard English. Here, frequent reading of popular or of professional materials though boring and uninteresting strengthens your comprehension of standard written sentence structure.

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