1. Raise your speed- comfort level.

How comfortable are you speeding in a car? How fast do you have to go before you feel you are “on the edge?” 70 MPH? 90? 120? How about 210 MPH, the speed the Indy car drivers can average? Get the point? Some people have learned to drive faster; their comfort level has been raised. You can do the same thing for reading. Face it, speed-reading isn’t mostly about technique; it is about mind set. Indeed this may be the reason you can play a CD while reading — you are merely driving along at 25MPH. Can you imagine an Indy car driver playing music in the background? No. The driver focuses all his or her skills on the track.
If you are out for a Sunday afternoon stroll in your book, then ignore this. But if you are serious about becoming a speed-reader, then start expecting more of yourself.

2. See the book as a mine full of ORE not GOLD.

Books offer wonderful gold to the prospector. But the reader must sort through tons of ore to find and refine the gold. The speed reader changes mindsets: quits fooling around with the ore and searches for the gold. What is a book anyway? What are words? They are “carriers” of truth, thoughts, ideas, a thesis, information, terms, concepts, notions. One reads a book to get the message, not to obsess on the words. (I’m tempted here to talk about Bible study, but we shall let it pass this time.) Switch your mindset to looking for the gold.

3. Quit Subvocalizing.

Most of us learned to read by sounding out the words. The trouble is, most of us never stopped. Sure, maybe we no longer audibly sound them out, or even move our lips, but
in our heads we are “reading to ourselves.” We have learned to read by Mouth-and-Ear. To become a speed reader one must discard this habit (or at least reduce it) and adopt the eye-and-mind method. It is mostly a matter of mind set. Instead of acting like the ear (even in one inside your head) is the route to the mind, begin believing that the eye is the gate to the mind. Start drinking in books through your eyes. Let the books pass into the mind directly from the eye, skipping the mouth
and ears. Go ahead and start trying it.

4. Use your finger.

For most beginning speed-readers this is a shock. They remember reading in grade school with their finger and assume it slows one down. Actually the finger is your pace car. It leads you forward at a speedy pace, and keeps you on focus and avoiding back-skipping. There are several ways to use your finger (or hand) but just try it out for starters. As you improve, buy one of the books on speed-reading and settle on the pattern which works best for you.

5. Break the Back-skip habit.

Most of us read along a line of type like this one to get the interpretation of the meaning, but as we read our eyes jump back to dwell on a word we just passed. We do this without knowing it. In fact, probably the only way to discover how many times you back skip is to have someone watch you read and count the eye-darts back. But, unless you have someone you feel pretty comfortable staring you in the face while you read, just trust me – you probably back-skip. How to stop? First confess you do it. Then start recognizing when you do it. Finally when tempted to back-skip, treat the book like a movie — that is, even if you miss something in a movie, you don’t stop the video and replay it. You just let it flow on through, hoping you’ll make it up later.

6. Use your peripheral vision.

Just like you must develop a muscle in the gym, so your mind can be trained to use the eye-gate to take in a broader amount of data. For instance, instead of reading left to right across the lines, pretend there is a line right down the middle of this page and you are following the line. Let your eye take in through peripheral vision the phrases to the right or left. Can you do it? With practice you can train your mind to read on “both sides of the road” even though your eyes are on the center line. To practice this skill most speed readers actually draw lines down pages of a book until they have mastered the skill with an invisible line. Let your mind drink in the information on the page without looking directly at it — just like you “see” the sides of the road when driving an automobile.

7. Learn to read KEY WORDS.

40-60% of the words on a page are neither critical nor important. Indeed, if someone took white-out and hid them from your sight, you could still figure out what
the paragraph was communicating. So, it stands to reason that if you could figure out which are these KEY WORDS you could scan past the other words and let your mind fill in the blank. Train your mind to find these key words and you’ll add even more speed to your reading.

8. Eliminate “Bus Stops” (Eye rests).

As your eyes read down this line they stop periodically and “rest” on a word. Children’s eyes often rest on every single word as they learn to read. Then as you grow your eyes move smoothly down the line like a lawn mower, then you stop a split second on a word, then start back up again. Most reader never get over this habit, but like a bus stopping at every corner, it slows down your progress. Try to reduce your eye rests to 3-4 per line, maybe even less as you get better… keep the eye moving smoothly line after line, letting your mind drink in the
knowledge on the line.

9. Take breaks.

The research is clear. Steady reading hour after hour is less efficient than taking a five minute break every hour or less. Sit down to read 100 pages in the next hour. Set an alarm even. Then reward yourself with a cookie or sandwich when you’ve reached your goal in 60 minutes.

10. Set a time goal.

Have a 300 page book to read? Decide how fast you’ll read it. If you are not a speedy reader, maybe you’ll only set the US average reading speed as your goal: one page a
minute (250 words/min.). Or if you are already an above average reader, set 100 pages an hour and plunge in. If you picked 100 pages an hour, that’s 50 in a half hour, 17 per 10 minutes or 1.7 pages per minute. Keep on track… pretend like you are in an auto race… push yourself, concentrate, get yourself out there on the “racer’s edge” — the line just short of out-of-control, yet still in command. Do it; it will be exciting!