Evelyn Wood shares her secrets on how to read extremely fast

Speed reading is one of those talents that were not given to everyone or so many people believe. Are you one of those people who will take hours to finish reading a newspaper article? Well, there are people who read quite slowly while others take only a matter of days to finish a humongous novel. This is a known fact but what many people do not know is that you can get training to improve your reading speed. The Evelyn Wood speed reading techniques have been employed for a really long time now. With this training program you will be able to improve your reading skills incredibly fast.

Reading and understanding

It is one thing to be able to read very fast but something totally different to read and comprehend what you have read. Some of the people who have the ability to read extremely fast tend to forget what they have read in a very short time. Reading for comprehension is vital especially for academic and professional purposes. Evelyn Wood developed training program that can be used by just about anyone on this planet to improve their skills.

She, a researcher on reading problems, could read as many as six thousand words every single minute. It is also possible for you to do the same. Some of the skills that she encouraged people to employ include: skimming, meta guidance and elimination of subvocalization. If you are able to practice only these three techniques you will be able to develop a very fast reading ability in a short time.

What do these techniques involve?

Some of the techniques that she taught come so naturally to some people. Take for instance skimming, this is done by everyone. When you buy a newspaper there are things that you do not read. Why is this so? Well, you will simply say that the headline did not please you. Skimming simply involves going over what is in the text and not actually reading it. When skimming, people do not read the whole text but rather focus on various parts of the text such as the first and last sentences or the topics and subtopics. When you see something that interests you then you read more intently.

Elimination of subvocalization is harder than skimming for many people. According to Evelyn Wood’s research most people try to imagine how the word will sound if pronounced. This effort of trying to imagine word pronunciation makes people spend more time trying to read the texts. It is almost similar to the lip reading where you move your lips trying to read the text. You will take an eternity to complete the text than if you just read without imagining pronunciations.

Meta guidance is a technique that has been highly discouraged by scholars but it actually is a good way to encourage speed reading. This process involves use of an object to guide the eye when reading. For instance a person can use a pen to guide their eye across the book they are reading or scroll across a text on the computer. Reading is faster in this case than if you are just moving the eyes.

Brain’s power to adapt

The human brain is a really powerful tool. It can adapt to changes ridiculously fast depending on how much the person is willing to adopt the change. There is another technique known as chunking and this one is used to improve reading skills by taking advantage of the brain’s power. The brain can combine seven (plus or minus two) pieces of information at once. When coupled with skimming, reading speed will be improved dramatically.

Speed reading seminars teach people how to chunk, reduce sub-vocalization, use Meta guidance and other techniques.