Before moving on to the advanced steps of learning to speed read, let me remind you how essential it is to have the habit of reading every day and reading silently for the specific purpose of becoming a speed reader. We can compare this to a person who came to a place for the first time. At your first glance, everything you see is unknown, and you have to look at all the things around you one by one to identify them. If he rarely visited that same place, there were few things he would recognize, but few. The more you frequent this place, the more familiar it becomes, and even without turning your head from left to right, you can guess what is on those sides. You will appreciate the point I am reiterating when you begin to perform the following steps:
1. Learn to read in groups. Most people tend to read word for word. Therefore, it is understood that when you read in this way, your reading is slow, in fact, too slow. You have to learn to assimilate more than one word at a time. The way you should read a text should be similar to how the lines of an editorial are written in the newspapers: they are grouped. Notice how fast it is to read the news in a newspaper; Since each line is written short (as in a group), your eyes catch everything they see on the line and then quickly glide to the next line, re-assimilating the entire line of words as a unit. Try it now and you will see that it works; it will increase your reading speed.
2. Familiarize yourself with the word groups. First, let me tell you the difference between a group of words and a group of words. As I explained earlier, a group of words are words taken as one and read as a unit. By dividing the sentence into two, three or four parts, depending on the length of the sentence, you can form groups of words. It will also depend on the extent of your peripheral vision (Later, in the third step, I will explain what peripheral vision is). The count of groups of words you can make in a sentence. This just shows that word groups are words that are grouped together but without full meaning. Word groups, on the other hand, are common group words that have a definite meaning. They are, we can say, common expressions and rhetorical figures, such as idioms, verb phrases, collocations, compound verbs, etc. Assimilation of groups of words does not depend on your peripheral vision, but on your familiarity with common expressions. Once your eyes scan a familiar expression, you don’t have to scroll your gaze to all the words in that sentence to see what the next words are. His eyes and brain quickly decode the familiar expression and he can quickly jump to the next group of words or group of words. Therefore, the more familiar you are with the different groups of words, the faster you will read.
3. Stretch your peripheral vision. Stretching your peripheral vision is expanding the range that your eyes can see at a glance. But what is peripheral vision? Look around you and then fix your eyes on something. The thing you fix your eyes on is vivid, of course. The other objects close to that thing that you may also be seeing, but not as vivid as the one your eyes are fixed on, are objects of your peripheral vision. The further you can see your peripheral vision, the better. If your peripheral vision can pick up four or five words at a glance, you are reading fast. If you can take in seven words or more at a time, you are a fast reader.
In short, it is your peripheral vision that allows you to read as many words as you can in one glance, and if you have narrow vision, if you cannot read in groups, and if you are familiar with only a few groups of words. , then you will not be able to take a quick scan.