How to Improve Reading Skills

(Video: How to Improve Reading Skills)

Reading is one of the things a lot of people have started learning as a kid. And as soon as a person adds this to his wide and spacious trunk of knowledge, it becomes a habit. It becomes an act he/she performs every day. It becomes a skill, and it is practiced.

Many people today want or need to read more, but say that they don’t have time. Then there are those who read, but read slowly, or perhaps don’t comprehend as much as they’d like.

Whatever category you fit into, reading is inevitable! And there are certain situations wherein reading is a hundred percent required.

Aside from eating, drinking, and breathing, of course, reading is also one of the things people do every single day. (Well, unless one is blind, or illiterate. That would be a different case. But for average people, reading is an inevitable habit or act that we perform every day.)

This is not even about book lovers who can stand a couple of hours without putting down a book. This is not even about whether we love reading or not. It is just really a part of our daily lives.

When we leave the comforts of our home, we read directional signage. We read when choosing a good meal from the menu of a newly-discovered restaurant. And then, there are your emails and text messages and finding out who left you a missed call.

The truth is we unconsciously read pretty much all the words we fixate our eyes on, sometimes it’s not even a matter of choice. So, why? Simply because we can.

• However, being fully aware of this now, have we all ever wondered how fast we can read? How much we have gotten ourselves so used to reading? How much it takes us to recognize the letters and then the word they form? How much time we take up defining the word we have just read? How we can better improve our reading skills? Or do we all think we’ve been doing it for years and years now, and we’re already experts at it?

Although most of us are pretty well-equipped readers, little do we all know that there definitely are reading best practices that will upgrade your reading skill further. (In fact, you may even already be doing them.)

This is not only for people who love reading, but for those who can’t hold their attention span long enough and definitely hate the thought of sitting down to finish reading long text. But again, reading has become some sort of necessity, an act one needs to perform on a daily basis.

Start Today!

• Today, start timing yourself and evaluating your average speed. Then you set a realistic goal, a target speed if you will. Much like losing weight, you must know your starting point, have goals for each day, and have a target weight.

• You can even try skimming articles or texts prior to comprehensively reading the same to get a general idea of what the text is talking about. Getting a general overview helps in your basic understanding of the text and improves the speed by which you can read the content.

• Jump your reading speed by simply taking a pencil, pen, or your finger and literally go left to right with it as you look at text and keep going. This makes reading interactive for the kinesthetic types and great for those with short attention span. Over time, you will be able to isolate your fixation points so that you can remove the pencil, and roll through reading, comprehend everything, and do so much faster than you could before.

To develop your reading skills, obviously, you must learn to practice reading at a more regular frequency. Reading more and reading often, even at a slow or normal pace can help increase a person’s vocabulary. This, in turn, helps the brain to process words more easily.

Research and several studies have shown that the human brain spends less time in processing mode to detect words faster that it is already familiar with by seeing patterns in letters and words they are forming, much like a word or document processor would auto correct commonly used words.

Less processing time means speedier reading and more words being read.

So train your brain’s capacity to identify and store more words. Make it a habit to read, and read often.