Skimming and scanning for better speed reading

Skimming and scanning for better speed reading

A big element of effective speed-reading is only reading those pieces of text that you actually need to read and not reading that which you don’t need to read.

To help you find the information you actually need to read and to avoid the information you don’t need to read it is important to practice skimming and scanning when reading text.

Skimming and scanning are actually two very different ways of going through text. Scanning while speed reading is the process of looking for a specific piece of information, like looking up a word in the dictionary for example. You don’t read every word; you “scan” through the text to look for what you want and stop once you have found and absorbed the information you are looking for.

Skimming on the other hand involves going through the book page by page just looking at chapter titles and sub titles and categories and pictures and diagrams to get a general feel for the text and its layout to familiarize yourself with its structure. And to also help get an overview of the subject matter the book is on. And to get a general impression of what the text contains.

To help you be more effective and get the most out of both skimming and scanning text it can be useful to know what your purpose is for reading the book. Knowing why you are reading a book and what you are looking for will help to get your brain alert for any information that your are looking for in the text as you read.

This is because there is a part of your brain involved in controlling your attention and awareness levels,  which is know as the “reticular activation system”(RAS) and is activated by goals and purpose.

Your RAS is so powerful that it can actually block out information you have not made clear you want from the text, and it can also alert you to information you are actually looking for. It dose this by controlling your perceptual filters, which helps to filter out any information you don’t need and alert you to what you do in the text.

So that is why it is so important to know why you are reading information and what you need or want from the text before you begin reading because if you are not totally sure of what information you need you are unlikely to find it and could actually miss it without even knowing.

Another big piece that is important to work on in order to become a fast speed reader, is to boost your speed reading stamina, your speed reading stamina is the amount of time you are able to read at speed for with good comprehension and recall. Boosting your speed reading stamina will help you to train and recondition your brain to reading at faster speeds and so will allow you to get all of the benefits of speed reading faster.

I have collected together all of the important things that you will have to do in order to boost your speed reading stamina, all of this information has been arranged into a 7 part e-course that you can take. To receive this valuable resource for boosting your speed reading stamina which will help you to increase your reading speed faster, simply visit my reading stamina web page and enter you name and a email address so that I can email it to you right away.

Thanks DAN!