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If you want to know how to read faster, you’ve probably tried to stop “subvocalizing” and reduce “backskipping.” What if I told you such “speed reading” techniques are probably a waste of time? Especially if you’re a serious learner who wants to retain what you read. And comprehend it so you can achieve the big goals you have for your life? If you’re the kind of learner who wants to read, remember and understand, you’ll love the tutorial on this page, because… There are at least three reasons why speed reading won’t help a lot of people. These reasons that they have: A limited vocabulary A limited understanding of the field A lack of multiple reading strategies How do I know? I’ve taught reading and writing at three universities. And I’ve taken multiple speed reading courses. Frankly, even if the classic speed reading techniques like controlling your eyes better and silencing your inner voice really did help you read faster… so what? If you can’t recognize what even a small percentage of words mean and lack familiarity with the topic area, you’re not going to understand any faster. This is the vocabulary part of the issue. People who know more words read faster. If you’re in that situation, you’d actually do better reading slowly, looking up words and terms, and interrupting your flow to aid understanding by reading outside of the main text. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juei8P-lWnY&list=PLkZ2FGJhR5R8axrLdWo9ZqV0PNRdLoN8l So with all of these points in mind, let’s reframe the question: If you’re learning to read faster, what are the fundamental speed reading techniques that will help you zip through multiple books in a single day? All while maximizing retention and comprehension.? These are the exact techniques we’re going to cover on this page. Who am I to address these topics? I’m a PhD, Mercator Scholar, member of the Australian Psychological Society and someone who blazes through multiple books week in and week out. I practice a set of the active reading strategies I’ve learned over the years, and continue to read the most up to date research on retention and comprehension. And here’s the best part: By weeding out the reading tactics that don’t make sense, I can help you read quickly without giving yourself the headaches most speed reading courses induce. So if that sounds good to you, let’s get started. How to Read Faster (While Retaining Vast Amounts) People email me all the time saying that they want to remember “everything they read.” That’s fantastic, but please define “everything.” Overall, you can retain a lot of information, but as a goal, “everything” doesn’t quite make sense. Especially when you consider that most of what we read consists of operational words like “the,” “and,” “if,” “but,” and so forth. In reality, unless you’re memorizing an entire book, almost no one actually needs or wants to remember everything. As the case of Jill Price’s so-called photographic memory demonstrates, trying to do so can in fact make you ill. So, rather than be vague and mysterious about what “everything” means, you will do much better by developing a number of “decision metrics” to guide you as you read. You can do this in the form of setting proper learning goals and using a well-formed learning cycle. In other words, set specific goals about how much you want to read and be clear about exactly what you want to retain from the reading. This can take some practice, and I have a full tutorial on how to find the main points in any book you can learn from. With these holistic learning structures in place, frustrations around your reading speed will soon disappear. You will safely leave behind all the instructions about recording your baseline reading speed and suppressing your inner voice, only to be told by speed reading experts that you’re supposed to make mental images and ask questions as you read. (Seriously? How are you supposed to reduce your inner voice and increase it at the same time? Speed reading courses that teach this idea should offend anyone with a modicum of common sense in their system.) So we start by thinking about goals for reading faster and remembering more. And to do that, let’s just expose the white elephant in the room: There is no perfect way to get started. But if there is something like perfection, just getting started is the key. That’s why I’m sharing the tips you’ll find below, all geared not only to reading faster, but retaining and understanding the material. Keep in mind however that the tips below are not necessarily “steps” to follow in order. Adding all of them to your reading practice will be useful and my hope is that you’ll rethink what reading is, and what reading can be. How to Read Faster While Retaining & Comprehending More Tip #1: Set goals with deadlines within a reading plan If you want to read faster, you have to practice reading more often. Why would reading more often help? When it comes to remembering more, you’ll get natural spaced repetition. Literally, the more you read, the more you’ll come across the big ideas and the granular details. Even without mnemonics, you’ll find yourself remembering more. And the best way to get yourself reading more frequently can be stimulated by creating a reading plan for yourself. That way you can develop topic mastery based on a combination of vocabulary, specific terminology, history and the perspectives of the main players in the field. For example, when I was researching my book, The Victorious Mind, I created a 90-day reading plan. That way, when using all the techniques you’ll discover on this page, I was consistently reading in two ways: According to a specific research schedule that gave me natural spaced repetition Reading in a “direction” that was leading me to completing a specific research goal Creating your own reading plan takes some practice, but here are some suggestions. These considerations are important because if you want to read faster in ways that stimulate retention, you need to develop familiarity with the topic. This is important because understanding comes from familiarity. The follow steps are based on a reading course I used to teach at Rutgers to help students develop topic mastery faster: Find the definitive textbook or most famous book on the topic. For example, when I started a reading project on consciousness, I quickly found out that Gödel, Escher, Bach is a key text in the field. Find 2-3 articles about the book and read these. Go beyond the Wikipedia page. Find 2-3 videos. Find 2-3 podcasts. Use my how to memorize a textbook strategy as you read to cull out the information you want to remember Follow-up with 2-3 of the books mentioned in the definitive textbook (In massive tomes like Gödel, Escher, Bach you’ll discover endless reading suggestions, so setting a limit is really important!) How will adding more material to your main book help you read faster? My friend and fellow memory expert Jonathan Levi calls this tactic, “brute force learning.” You’re literally taking on a bit more than you can handle using this approach. The answer behind why getting outside of one’s comfort zone helps you read and retain more is simple: When you start with the fundamentals and develop knowledge of the field, you’ll give yourself the most important reading skill in the world: pattern recognition. Notice how easily you can name the spiral pattern above, both as a spiral and as a set of stained glass windows. This is because of pattern recognition that comes from repeated exposure to the information. As a consistent reader, reading according to a schedule will give you a similar effect with ideas. In setting proper reading goals, you’re learning what it means to know your field. The more you know, the more you can know, and that will naturally help your brain: Recognize big and important ideas faster Connect them to fundamental concepts in instantly memorable ways Using multiple mediums like video and audio tap into more representations of your brain and add more perspectives from others who have read the book Note: I personally expect every beginning to be “front loaded” with more effort and embrace Jonathan’s brute force learning concept. Only after some “pattern recognition” has been developed do I expect to read and understand faster. However, we want to make sure we don’t fall into collector’s fallacy, which is why when I suggest 2-3 other resources, I really mean 2-3. Avoid spending all your time collecting things to read and make sure to be thorough about completing small sets or clusters of material before moving on. To develop your pattern recognition as quickly as possible as you read for retention, let’s look at the next powerful strategy. Tip #2: The U.S.S.R. Technique It would be nice if life were simple enough that we can always read at the same time and the same place – just like we did during our school years. In fact, with a bit of planning, we still can. And scheduling the time and place for reading is one of the most important strategies for reading faster that I know. This is thanks to the power of rhythm and flow. Reading when you’re interrupted is really not reading at all. If you want to read faster, remove all disturbances. U.S.S.R. stands for Uninterrupted, Sustained, Silent Reading. Instead of doing eye training exercises to expand your peripheral vision, protect your environment from visual interruptions. Read in a quiet place with little or no foot traffic. Put borders around your time. And if you have family or roommates with schedules that interfere with your own, take responsibility and communicate with them about your needs. It would be nice if other people would remember and respect your schedule and goals, but it’s unrealistic to hold them to that standard. Be firm and protect both your time and space. That said, I wasn’t always able to read in the same place and at the same times everyday when I was in university. That’s why I’ve shared everything I did to get multiple A+ grades in grad school: https://youtu.be/si0aTKs_cmQ These study habits are powerful and that’s because they maximize your personal flexibility. But note how in the video tutorial I share with you my custom earplugs strategy. It takes a bit of discipline to carry them everywhere, but they really do help put the “silent” in the silent reading formula you’ve just learned. If you think that noise doesn’t affect how fast you read and retain information, I suggest looking at this study. Basically, it found that noise contributes to low performance outcomes on just about any cognitive task you engage in. Tip #3: Learn to relax A lot of people are so stressed out about not reading quickly enough that they tense their bodies. This lack of physical ease puts their posture out of whack, impedes breathing and makes being alive generally uncomfortable. When learning how to read a book fast, you need to be in an optimal physical position. Rather than give a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach (that doesn’t exist), I suggest you experiment. You may need to sit in different ways depending on the topic matter, so explore as many positions and places as you can. Either way, please rest assured that good research demonstrates meditation helps with comprehension. This systematic study also shows the positive impact meditation can have on both comprehension and long-term retention. Meditation has been shown to dramatically improve focus and concentration. These improvements translate directly to reading faster and remembering more. Meditation is also a key strategy for developing concentration on demand. These 12 concentration meditations should help you out if you want a number of routines to follow. Concentration is another key to being able to read quickly and not get frustrated when you come across confusing or unfamiliar terms. And here’s another point to keep in mind, related to my strong suggestion that you just start reading more often: Reading itself has been scientifically shown to increase relaxation. It’s a win-win when it comes to living a much more relaxed life. Tip #4: Do Not Avoid Reviewing I’ve never understood the emphasis on eliminating “back skipping” or “regression” you see in the speed reading community. Avoiding re-reading strikes me as precisely the way to make sure you forget information, not to mention failing to understand it. Rather than avoid back skipping, I suggest reviewing frequently and strategically. For example, I like to hold my finger in the page where the chapter started and go back to it several times. This technique is kind of like inner-book interleaving, which we’ll talk about more later. (It is not really possible to reproduce this technique when reading digitally, though some software programs allow for multiple bookmarks that make this easier. If the document is numbered and you have a Major System, memorizing page numbers can help with this as well.) But the main point is that I don’t stress if my mind wanders or I need to go back. Reviewing is a way to keep focus, maintain connection with the book and actively connect the dots for both comprehension and retention while reading. I’m biased, but I also find that physical books are better for avoiding mind wandering and you get other benefits, as I’ve described in detail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er-k8Ecgdfo Here’s a sub-point about re-reading that is worth exploring: Scientists have shown why reading aloud to children is helpful. But I’ve also found it helpful to get at understanding faster. For example, when reading difficult science articles or philosophy, I sometimes come across dense sentences. Rather than repeating them silently in my mind, I get my mouth involved and sound them out. Even better than understanding faster, Colin Macleod and his fellow researchers have found that sounding out words improves retention in memory. They call it the Production Effect. So even if reading out loud might technically feel slower, it’s actually leading you to better understanding and memory faster in many cases. Tip #5: Do Not Wreck Your Eyes Based On Bad Science A lot of speed reading books ask you to follow a pen in an infinity symbol. Or they might ask you to draw dots on your pages to impose three columns, the idea being that if you only perform three eye fixations on each line you’ll read faster. Scott Young has deeply questioned the research on eye training and reducing subvocalization. Frankly, I think he could have gone a lot further. So many of the claims are based on self reporting by people who probably don’t know enough about testing themselves for us to believe they are being accurate. What about using a pointer? Maybe, but think about the bizarre origin story for this technique: Evelyn Wood says she discovered it when a book fell off a desk and flew past her. As she tried to catch it, she noticed her finger running along a sentence. (For more details on this history, read Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That Speed Reading Worked, by Marcia Biederman.) I don’t know about you, but I doubt I could ready anything from a book in motion, let alone have my finger help with the process. This puzzling origin story only gets weirder when you look into fraudulent claims involving JFK himself as perhaps the most famous person to fall for such speed reading fallacies. We can go deeper: Why would you put something between yourself and the information, either your finger, pencil or a chopstick? (Yes, I’ve encountered a course that suggested carrying around a chopstick.) This strategy sounds like the opposite of how you would want to train your eyes – which would be unassisted and definitely unobstructed. Plus, how are you supposed to use a pointer on mobile, when your finger would constantly be clicking links and opening new pages? As you can see, some of the speed reading teaching on the market falls apart quickly when held to scrutiny. Tip #6: Consider Interleaving I’ve al…
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