Everyone knows the advantages of being able to process information, especially written information, quickly in today’s world. After all, in the world of today the written word can reach across the world. Just as importantly, it can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

This means that when you’re searching for information, you don’t really have to – it’s already at your fingertips. What hasn’t changed is our ability to absorb that information. A person today reads in roughly the same way that an ancient roman used to – the language has changed, but the methods of the average person of using the written language, haven’t changed at all.

At least not until now. But in the last decade or so, advanced methods of speed reading have been developed that actually let you absorb and retain information faster. Most of these methods require professional training (for example, by taking a good speed reading course, such as ‘7 speed reading’). They also usually require a reasonable amount of practice to be effective.

As a simple example, some professional courses teach you to read alternate lines backward, as this saves on time, but this is hardly something you’ll be able to do without training and a reasonable amount of practice. But there are methods that are far simpler that can help to enhance the reading speed of the ‘amateur’ speed-reader.

One of the first methods of increasing your speed is to read a ‘concentrate’ of the matter. This means that you read the most relevant parts of a book first. You don’t really need to know the biography of the author, do you? So skip it. Then you can also skip the prologue in most cases – it usually contains a mere introduction to the book, and rarely contains information that will be of real use to you.

However, the Epilogue is a completely different matter – make sure you read it, because it is usually used to sum up the book, and can even provide extra informations from later editions. The epilogue of ‘Great Expectations’ for example, provides an alternate ending for the book that the author originally intended to put in, and compares that ending with the real ending of the book. You see, useful information. The epilogue also usually contains an intelligent and considered opinion by a literary expert about the subject matter of the book itself.

Now, while you’re reading the book itself, you need to identify important pages. One way of doing this is to look at the section headings in a chapter. Reading these before you read the chapter can help you correctly identify the most important pages in the chapter, so that you can focus on those and skim over the rest, saving you a great deal of time, and enabling you to process the truly important information more quickly.

Retaining what you’ve read is also of vital importance, and the best way to do it is to discuss your reading matter with others. You can also mark the most important places in the book. If you’ve read the book at night, you can go over the section headings and skim over the most important parts again in the morning. The read the absolutely crucial sections again in detail. Then meet up with friends interested in the same topic and discuss the book, and what you thought of it. The next day, write out your thoughts on the book into a small essay, without opening the book to look up references.

Efficient comprehension is a careful balance between speed and retention of the assimilated matter. You have to strike a fine balance when you speed read in this way, making sure that you give enough time to the real important parts of what you’re reading, so that you absorb and retain them, while skimming over the rest at a reasonable speed.