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Whether you are a student, a teacher, an adult or a child, the ability to read quickly and to retain the essential meaning of what you read is very important. Reading is a skill that we pick up when we are very young, and despite constant practice, after a certain point, we never really push ourselves when it comes to speed. If you think about other skills, you will soon realize that reading is much like them; we get better with practice, and when we strive to improve it, we will see results! If you are interested in learning to speed read, you'll soon see that a bit of study into the type of technique that is used is all you need to get started.

Give some thought to how you learned to read. Letters came first, then words. And you almost certainly were taught to read by sounding out words. As an adult though, there is no need to do so anymore. You can merely see a word on a page and immediately recognize it as such. Part of speed reading is understanding that the same principle can be applied to entire sentences. You can get the meaning of a sentence without necessarily looking at every single word.

If you are looking at a page of text, anywhere from forty to sixty percent of the words are of lesser importance. This includes articles, conjunctions and other similar words. When you are speed reading, you acknowledge that they are there, but you do not need to read them specifically. You can infer their presence from other words and you'll be able to move much faster. You'll also see that when it comes to speed reading, you will have a great deal of success if you look at the sentence as a whole rather than as a series of words strung end to end.

Give yourself a mechanical cue as well. When you are reading a page, put a notecard or a piece of paper directly above the line that you are reading. Then as you read, scroll the piece of paper down the page. Essentially, you'll be chasing yourself down the page and you will find that your eyes will automatically try to keep pace with your notecard. Try this slowly at first and then let it speed up. You'll find that in only four or five sessions, you'll be able to read a great deal faster, and before too long, you'll be able to keep u the speed without the notecard at all.

Remember that when you try these techniques that you don't do them constantly. The human brain processes best in twenty minute chunks. After twenty minutes, you'll find that you will slow down and this can be quite frustrating; it might even make you doubt that you can read more quickly at all. Remember to take frequent breaks, and despite the nature of the activity, you don't have to feel rushed!

Speed reading is a great skill to pick up for many reasons, so see what you can do with this powerful tool today!