How can I become a great speed reader?

Question

What is the secret?

Read rapidly and understanding at the same time. How?

I have a ton of books to read.

Answer 1

That's actually a really, really good question. "Speed Reading" is a talent that is not easily acquired. There are methods to read faster, though. For example, DO NOT, under any circumstance, listen to music and read at the same time. You absorb nothing. Same goes for watching TV. Also, I find it helps to eat first. Don't know why, but it helps. Reading on a full stomach is always better.

Answer 2

If you are serious about this, you can take a class. In my city, the local university offers them twice a year for different age groups. (These are mostly geared to different ages of school children, but they teach college age and adults, too.)
If you will type "speed reading" into your search engine, you will also get a number of hits.
You can check with tutoring services. I have seen commercials on TV for one of the nationwide companies and they happened to show a kid sitting at a computer screen with the copy moving up the screen much like a teleprompter. Key phrases were highlighted to help teach their eyes to search for them. Presumably as one became accustomed to reading the moving copy, it would be speeded up.
I learned as part of an experimental class in my junior high school. It was a method that had you use your fingers or an unmarked piece of paper to move slowly down the page as a prompt and to help keep you from getting lost in the copy. We were given short stories to read as fast as we could with a short time allotment, 1-2 minutes. When the teacher called time, we moved to the back of the story to answer questions we could only answer from the reading. (The point was to read fast AND retain the information.) Once we could retain 90 percent or so on a regular basis, we moved onto longer stories and longer time limits. It took practice and wasn't the sort of thing one could easily do alone, but the skill set has stayed with me into adult hood, and made high school and college reading much more managable. I highly recommend it. (If reading non-technical information, newspapers, light fiction, etc., I can read about 2000 words per minute. Not any kind of a record, but I really enjoy reading and it lets me breeze through more books in the time I have available.)

Answer 3

I think some people are born with it. I was. Some take classes to become one.

My grandmother, father and I could all read fast. My daugher can't though.

Answer 4

Practice makes perfect.
Or spark notes.