I\u2019ve given you a lot of speed reading information in a very short amount of time.\u00a0 Hopefully you\u2019re beginning to realize that speed reading isn\u2019t as mysterious as you previously thought.\u00a0 All it really involves is breaking old habits and learning new techniques.\u00a0 Once successful, you\u2019ll read faster and with better comprehension than you ever have before.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not all.\u00a0 Speed reading with better comprehension helps you gain more knowledge.\u00a0 And more knowledge gives you an edge over your competition; something that\u2019s crucial to getting ahead and achieving your goals.<\/p>\n
Moving on, I want to share with you something that\u2019s not necessarily a habit.\u00a0 But it does slow reading speed so it needs to be addressed before you can increase your reading speed.\u00a0 It\u2019s called fixation and it\u2019s pretty interesting.<\/p>\n
Fixation is really nothing more than a fancy word for focus.\u00a0 Trying to focus is something your eyes do continually throughout each day.\u00a0 Most of us take our eyes\u2019 ability to focus for granted, not realizing just how important this ability is to our sense of vision.<\/p>\n
Fixation plays a key role in our ability to read, too.\u00a0 If you recall from my talk about subvocalization, it\u2019s the all important first step.\u00a0 First the eyes fixate on or see a word, then the mouth says the word, then the ears hear the word and finally the brain registers the word.<\/p>\n
When you read, your eyes don\u2019t only fixate.\u00a0 They\u2019re actually in continual motion, so along with eye fixations are eye jumps.\u00a0 Eye jumps are intermittent rapid eye movements that take place in between every eye fixation.\u00a0 Together eye fixations and eye jumps cause the eye to continually focus and refocus as you read.<\/p>\n
In a single line of text twenty words long, your eyes probably fixate and jump about eighteen times per line!\u00a0 That\u2019s because you still read word-for-word and your eyes are in the habit of focusing on a single word at time.\u00a0 Although eye stops and jumps occur so fast you don\u2019t even realize it, the fact that they happen so frequently causes a slowdown in reading speed.<\/p>\n
To help you get a clearer picture of what\u2019s happening, imagine a horse pulling a carriage through the streets surrounding Central Park.\u00a0 Those horses wear blinders to keep their eyes focused straight ahead.\u00a0 Without those blinders, the horses would have a bigger vision span. Seeing all the activity going on around them would spook them and endanger tourists. Blinders narrow the horse\u2019s vision and keep horse moving safely, but slowly.<\/p>\n
Luckily for us, we\u2019re not horses walking around Central Park.\u00a0 We\u2019re humans looking for a way to improve our reading speed.\u00a0 And one of the easiest ways to do this is by taking off our blinders so we can increase our vision span and focus on more words in a single fixation.<\/p>\n
How do we do that?<\/p>\n
One way is to start reading chunks of words instead of a single word at a time.\u00a0 Once you learn to how to chunk words together to form thoughts that your brain understands, your reading speed automatically increases \u2013 and so does your comprehension.\u00a0 When you read in chunks, your eyes only have to make a few fixations, instead of the eighteen or so that happen when reading one word at a time. Effective word chunking requires learning how to identify the right balance of words so that the chunks make sense to you.<\/p>\n
Video Version of Post
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