I hear all the time that the only way to get faster at reading is to keep reading, but what goes in the brain to help with that? I’ve been reading my entire life but I feel like I’m still a slow reader.
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Practice… and shortcuts. Mental shortcuts occur like when your brain will only really consider the first and last letter along with the length of a word to determine what it is instead of looking at every letter. This is how people can read those sentences where the words are jumbled up, the brain doesn’t really need those letters.
Another thing that speeds up reading is to stop subvocalization. When many people start learning to read they are instructed to read out loud, sounding out the words audibly. When people get a little better at reading they stop saying the words aloud but they might still mouth them or even show minor switches of their vocal cords as they imagine the sounds in their head. The problem with this is that forming words into sounds and mouth movements is taxing to the brain even if they aren’t performed. Reading faster (~300 wpm and up) will be difficult if you are still trying to subvocalize what you read into sounds, and attempting to read at that speed can help you to stop subvocalization which will let you improve.
Do you mean you’re interested in speed reading specifically? That’s a technique where people train themselves to read much faster than the average reading speed. Are you looking for ways to improve your reading speed in that way?
As you read more and more, you’ll just get used to seeing a lot of words and phrases repeated so often that you can kinda start to skip stuff without having to fully read it, because you already know what it says without scanning your eyes across the entire thing. Reading more will also expand your vocabulary and your understanding of grammar, which will reduce how often you get tripped up by words you don’t know or sentences phrased in a way you don’t immediately grasp.
However, there are hard limits to how fast anyone can read. There was a “speed-reading” craze in the 20th century, as the inventors of various methods argued you could teach yourself to read as fast as thousands of words per minute. But when they tested these methods rigorously against people reading normally, they found that people’s *comprehension* and *retention* plummeted when they were “speed-reading”, so they weren’t really reading, they were just skimming, which people obviously can already do.
There’s really no alternative to just reading more, and progressively reading harder stuff. As you get more practice, you’ll get better and faster at it.
Just Google how to speed read. There are lots of tips to read faster, like reading just the first part and last part of a line. You’re brain will fill in the rest.
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