Reading Speed Test

Why you need to practice reading speed

Maybe we don’t pay attention to such time consumption at all, but research shows that in the process of reading a book, the time spent on eye movement and focus accounts for 1/3 of the total reading time!
What’s the meaning? That is to say, if you spend 3 hours reading a book, there will be an hour of nothing to do, and the light will move your eyes!

vision problems

The reason for reading word by word is that the vision of the eyes has not been trained, and only one word can be read at a time of focus. Let’s look at how to improve the reading speed through training.

Know your reading speed

Before training, you have to pass the test to know your current reading speed. Only with data can you evaluate, and only with data can you improve.

The first step is to find an exercise book

Before the test, find a practice book. This practice book will be used throughout the training program. You can find a skill or personal improvement book as a practice book, not a novel.

The second step, one minute test

Grab your workbook, set a one-minute countdown, and start reading at your usual pace. At the end of a minute, look at how much you have read, this is your reading speed. Typically, most people read at around 200-250 words/minute.

However, after testing your reading speed, you also need to test your comprehension speed! Because the speed of reading cannot be faster than the speed of comprehension.

How to test this? There is a general way to judge: after you have completed the one-minute reading test, repeat what you just read. The criteria for judging comprehension are as follows:

If you can’t repeat the original text at all, your comprehension is 0; if you can only repeat the important content and the overall context, but you can’t tell the main points, then the comprehension level is about 50%; Between -50%; if everything can be repeated, then comprehension is 100%.

Now, let’s talk about ways to improve reading speed, remember, after each training, test the comprehension speed! After each training, test the speed of comprehension! After each training, test the speed of comprehension! Say the important thing three times.

How to improve reading speed

Method one finger reading

The so-called finger reading method is to use the fingers as a guide when reading, and the eyes follow the fingers to read.
What? Can this kind of reading method used by elementary school students improve reading speed?
Yes! When reading, if there is a finger guide, the reading speed will be greatly improved. How important is the guide, you can do an experiment.
Now, control your eyeballs to make a regular circular motion.
If nothing else, then you must be like me – a widow can’t do it!
Now, find a friend of yours and ask him to use one finger (any finger except the middle finger) as a circular guide, and then your eyeballs will follow his finger movements.
This time, is it easy?
Therefore, this skill that we learned in elementary school but slowly forgot, it is time to make a comeback.

Method 2 3-2-1 practice method

Now, grab your workbook, set a three-minute countdown, and read, using your fingers as a guide as you read.
After three minutes, mark where you read. In these three minutes, if you use your fingers as a guide, you may read three pages. This is the first step in the practice.
The second step is to set a countdown of two minutes. This time, you need to read all the content of the first reading within two minutes. We just said that it is three pages.
The third step is to set a one-minute countdown. This time, you need to read all the content you read the first time within one minute, or those three pages.
This is the 3-2-1 practice method, which requires you to read the same amount of content in less and less time.

Method 3 2-2-2 practice method

Likewise, get out your workbook, set a 2-minute countdown, and read using your fingers as a guide.
After two minutes, mark your reading position. This is the first step, assuming you have read three pages.
The second step is to set a countdown of 2 minutes, but this time, you need to read twice as much as you read in the first step, that is, six pages.
The third step, the same two minutes, you need to read three times the content of the second step, that is, nine pages.
This is the 2-2-2 practice method, which requires you to read twice and three times the content in turn in the same amount of time.

Method 4 500 words/minute practice

500 words, almost 3 pages of a book.
On your workbook, count out 3 pages, then set a one-minute countdown and try to read all 3 pages within one minute.

Method 5: Practice with Kindle

This is what a reader told me. After hearing about the vision problem, he used his brain – if it is an e-reader like the Kindle, you can artificially reduce the number of words on a line, so that each line of eyes The number of times of focusing is not less?
I tried it, it really works!

This method is very simple:

When reading, set the face margins to a minimum in the Kindle’s page setup.
For people with average reading speeds, each line will be in focus many times, so reading is slow.
In this way, one line of the screen displays fewer words through artificial settings, so as to help us narrow the range of eye movement when reading.
In this way, when reading, the eyes do not need to move left and right, just up and down. After adjusting, I can scan many lines at a glance.
How to train
For the four methods mentioned above, you can take three weeks to practice with a fixed 20-30 minutes every night. I am relatively stupid, so when I practiced at that time, it lasted for a month, one practice time per day ( 25 minutes).
21 days, 20 minutes a day, you can learn a skill that will last a lifetime, there’s nothing more cost-effective than this.

Warning about reading speed

Regarding the reading speed, the 2-3 times improvement can be achieved completely through training. It may be that I myself have not reached the level of video reading, so I think that for most people, pursuing this level is rather vain.
I once read a story about speed reading in an article, a teacher told learning to read with the trajectory of the S line, you can read war and peace in 10 minutes.
As a result, the student really finished reading, and after reading he said: I only know that this book was written by a Russian.
Use this story to tell everyone that reading should not blindly pursue speed, and your speed actually depends to a certain extent on your understanding of a certain field – for example, I read books on personal improvement quickly, but a month You may not be able to read a novel.
However, using the above method, it is absolutely no problem to increase the reading speed by 0.5-1 times a month.