10 Days to Faster Reading summary

If you do something enough times, you form a habit around it, and the same goes for reading. So what are some of the classic bad reading habits, and how do you fix them?

A common bad reading habit is passive daydreaming. While we read, we’re thinking about a million other topics, none of which are related to what we’re actually reading.

So now you know the bad habits. But how can you become a faster, more efficient reader? Start by following these three simple steps.

First, have a clear purpose in mind and a sense of responsibility for what you read. This will help both with organization and concentration.

The third step in becoming an efficient reader is learning how to actually read faster. For most of us, reading training ended in elementary school, so our reading methods are quite outdated. These next blinks will provide you with new reading strategies that you can try out for yourself. Try them all, and see which ones work best for you.

The first technique involves focusing only on important words and skipping over the rest. When we read, our eyes tend to jump around in stops and starts instead of a smooth flow.

Here are a few more great tricks to becoming a better reader:

One way to overcome the habit of subvocalizing is to focus on the white space just above each line. This way, you can still see the top half of the letters and can thus easily understand them without becoming fixated on the words themselves.

When we learned to read as children, we always used a finger or another object to pace our reading and better understand the words. Why should we stop training that skill once we know how to read? We shouldn’t, and in fact it can be very helpful.

Eyes naturally follow movement. For example, when there’s a fly in the room, your eyes notice it immediately. Likewise, pointing and moving your fingers can be used to guide your eyes more quickly through a text. Simply place your finger to the left or to the right of a line, and as you read across the line, move your finger slowly yet steadily down toward the bottom of the page.