|
|
|
|
|
|
by arbitrage
1465 days ago
|
|
|
You're trying to read faster by holding on tighter. It's never going to work. I struggled with the same thing. You're sabotaging your own expectations by using words like "skim" and "repulse". If you're going to improve your reading speed, you need to stop priming yourself for failure. As another poster said, you should plan to use different reading techniques for different books. Recreational reading is much easier to read super-fast. Textbooks and research papers just aren't. It's similar to how an encryption algorithm works: your brain is really good at finding patterns. You can read faster by letting your brain do the work it's designed to do. Fiction books are very repetitive in their writing style. Technical works aren't; their content is very dense, and there is hardly any repetition. You'll never find easy patterns and repeated words there. They're not very compressible, and they're not very speed-readable. Speed reading is all about look-ahead, look-behind, and pattern recognition. You are having a hard time because you are trying to force your brain to do it all algorithmically lock-step. Ideally, you want your eyes to maintain a steady rate of scan. Try to avoid using a finger like another poster said; it slows you down in the long-run. Eventually, your brain will start assembling words you have just read with words you're about to read, and give you the sentence in total. It feels really weird the first times you do it. You're trying to let your brain to do more of the repetitive processing on its own, without you explicitly telling it to do that. It takes a lot of practice. It's achievable. Keep pushing yourself, but you need to relax while you're doing it. It's a very delicate and tricky balance to achieve, if you're starting out as a slogging reader. |
|
|