| A method is to train yourself to another mode of reading which is much more visual: - Do not recite the read text using your inner monologue: process it purely visually - Start two or three words after the beginning of your sentence so it’s still on your visual field but not at the center - In the same manner you should be able to finish reading a sentence before your eyes gaze on the last word Your reading speed in this mode should be a lot faster and becoming quicker with experience. However it’s only useful to check information until you find some useful gems. You cannot skip the traditional way of reading if you hope to learn or grasp some concepts because the cognitive cost is incompressible. Also learn to detect non-informative paragraphs to accelerate when you see them and even skip them completely if there is 0 chance that they contain some surprising information. Using this method you are just really learning to scan text using your visual cortex to detect parts which are informative / have a high surprisal factor (which depend of your previous knowledge and your beliefs), which you have then to read normally to assimilate. Edit: As others have also mentioned for books, if it’s not a mandatory reading and it’s not really informative / you don’t like it the best course of action is to stop reading that book. Scanning through an entire book just to feel good having read it is pointless. NNT gave a neat heuristic: only read books you would read again, and usually if you can skip / visually scan a lot of a book, you would better spend your time reading a more interesting one. |