Before I continue with the advanced steps to learn speed reading, let me remind you how essential it is to have the habit of reading every day and to read silently for the specific purpose of becoming a speed reader. We can compare this to a person arriving at a place for the first time. At his first glance, everything he sees is unfamiliar to him, and he has to look at all the things around him one by one to identify them. If he rarely visited that same place, there were few things he would recognize, but only a few. The more often you go to this place, the more familiar it becomes, and even without turning your head from left to right, you can tell what is on those sides. You’ll appreciate the point I’m reiterating when you start doing 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 take in more than one word at a time. The way you should read a text should be similar to how editorial lines are written in newspapers: they are grouped. Notice how fast it is to read news in a newspaper; since each line is written short (as in a group), their eyes take in everything they see on the line and then quickly slide to the next line, again taking in the entire line of words as a unit. Try to do it now, and you will see that it works; your reading speed will increase.
2. Be familiar with groups of words. 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 (I’ll explain what peripheral vision is later in step 3.) 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 possess a definite meaning. They are, we can say, common expressions and figures of speech, such as idioms, verb phrases, collocations, phrasal verbs, etc. The 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 slide your eyes to all the words in that sentence in order to see what the next words are. Your eyes and brain quickly decode the familiar expression and you can quickly jump to the next set of words. Therefore, the more familiar you are with the different groups of words, the faster you will read.
3. Stretch your peripheral vision. Expanding your peripheral vision is expanding the range 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 on, are objects in your peripheral vision. The further away you can see your peripheral vision, the better. If your peripheral vision can take in four or five words at a glance, you’re a fast reader. If you can read seven or more words at once, you’re a speed reader.
In short, it’s your peripheral vision that allows you to read as many words as you can at a glance, and if you have narrow vision, you can’t read in groups and are familiar with only a few groups of words. , then he won’t be able to speed read.