Faster Effective Reading

The comprehension passages on any well-developed reading course are designed to help you increase your reading speed. A higher reading rate, with no loss of comprehension, will help you in other subjects as well as English, and the general principles apply to any language. Naturally, you will not read every book at the same speed. You would expect to read a newspaper, for example, much more rapidly than a physics or economics textbook but you can raise your average reading speed over the whole range of materials you wish to cover so that the percentage gain will be the same whatever kind of reading you are concerned with.

The reading passages you need to read to improve your reading should be of an average level of difficulty for your stage of instruction. They should be approximately 500 words long. They should be about topics of general interest that do not require much specialized knowledge. Thus they should fall between the kind of reading you might find in your textbooks and the much less demanding kind you will find in a newspaper or light novel. If you read this kind of English, with understanding, at, say, 400 words per minute, you might skim through a newspaper at perhaps 650–700, while with a difficult textbook you might drop to 200 or 250.

Perhaps you would like to know what reading speeds are common among native English-speaking university students and how those speeds can be improved. Tests in Minnesota, U.S.A., for example, have shown that students without special training can read English of average difficulty, for example Tolstoy's War and Peace in translation, at speeds of between 240 and 250 w.p.m. with about 70% comprehension. Minnesota claims that after 12 half-hour lessons, one a week, the reading speed can be increased, with no loss of comprehension, to around 500 w.p.m. It is further claimed that with intensive training over seventeen weeks, speeds of over 1000 w.p.m. can be reached, but this would be quite exceptional.

If you get to the point where you can read books of average difficulty at between 400 and 500 w.p.m. with 70% or more comprehension, you will be doing quite well, though of course any further improvement of speed-with-comprehension will be a good thing.
In this passage we shall be looking at some of the obstacles to faster reading and what we can do to overcome them.

Think of the passage as a whole:
When you practice reading with passages shorter than book length, like this passage, do not try to take in each word separately, one after the other. It is much more difficult to grasp the broad theme of the passage this way, and you will also get stuck on individual words which may not be absolutely essential to a general understanding of the passage. It is a good idea to skim through the passage very quickly first (say 500 words in a minute or so) to get the general idea of each paragraph. Titles, paragraph headings and emphasized words (underlined or in italics) can be a great help in getting this skeleton outline of the passage. It is surprising how many people do not read titles, introductions or paragraph headings. Can you, without looking back, remember the title of this passage and the heading of this paragraph?