Normal speed reading

Fast reading consists of being able to read a large number of words in a minimum amount of time.

The average number of words a person usually reads per minute is between 200 and 300 words.

But with practice and following some guidelines you can read up to 1,500 words per minute. The person who holds the reading record manages to read the amount of 25,000 words per minute, of course this is only possible if we change our way of reading.

Changing the way we read.

The main mistake when reading a text is that we pronounce the words in our mind to try to understand them, causing us to use our eyes at the same speed it takes us to pronounce the words in our mind.

This way of reading is called under-vocalization and we only manage to waste a lot of time reading.

We have to achieve the goal of not using vocalization, so we have to achieve not only not using our lips while reading, but we also have to achieve not reading the text in our mind.

Methods to achieve to change the way of reading

You can use your finger or an object such as a pen to scroll through the text. If we put it under the words, by scrolling it we force the eyes to scroll the page at a faster speed than we would.

We have to increase the reading speed to the point where we can no longer comprehend what we read and once we reach this limit we have to go back a bit to read it again. In this way we can get to read much faster than reading the same text using sub-vocalization.

It is necessary to avoid that our eyes stop after each word (which would be saccade one), if we manage to cover 2 words in each saccade we will double the amount of words we can read per minute.