This was a thread I posted originally on Twitter.
🔉Read without the voice in your head : often times all of us read with a voice. We are used to this. Turns out that you can do without it. Read visually and don’t sound them in your head.
↔️When you’re reading(say in English) you typically read left to right, word by word. You do this because as a child you had to understand every word and you also read slower. But try this, when you now look at a word, you can see more than 1. That’s because our vision can accomodate more. So when you’re trying to read fast start from the middle of the line perhaps, because your vision will capture the rest of it as well and allows you to move quicker.
👆I didn’t know this when I grew up and considered this a sign of being weak at reading. The best way to read fast is to use your finger to follow the words. When you don’t have an active object to follow, your eyes don’t move as quickly. Try both ways and see the difference
đź“‘ Before I pick a book I usually read a lot of summaries of it (ofc only for non fiction) that gives me a fair idea of what the book is trying to convey so I can concentrate on examples rather than spend time with each idea. I feel this makes me understand a concept better.
✍️ Try summarizing what you know. Most people do highlights on pages, but for me I never go back to these(maybe my poor system, could improve here) but if I write my understanding of the book it helps me move on to the next and helps me retain better as well.
Some other suggestions on this thread were:
“font sizes were a big revelation for me this year. using the kindle app on a large tablet did wonders for my reading speed”
“just an addition to it that helped me recently was immersive reading, i.e.. audible at 2.1x + reading the book together. Increasing playback speed bit by bit. Also got natural readers extension for Chrome.”