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.
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