With the amount of information that people need to process everyday, increased rate for absorbing and understanding information is a must. Documents, emails, books and other materials are piling up. It would be nice to bump up the average words per minute from 200 to 1000.

A normal person reads with a voice saying words out loud inside the head. There are some who even mouth the them, a process more commonly called subvocalization. The concept of speed reading is to eliminate all these unnecessary processes. There are a lot of factors that come into play to achieve a faster speed.

A general rule to studying text fast is to minimize the number and duration of getting fixated on a line of text. Speed readers do not read in a straight line, contrary to what was taught in schools. One method is taking snapshots of the text in the area of focus. This is a better way of viewing text than moving from one word to another. The goal is to decrease the amount of time one fixates on a word which is on average at . 25 seconds.

Naturally, our brains can eventually be programmed to identify text in shapes to subconsciously translate the figure into words. This is why taking snapshot of the material works. Another method is skimming. This is very popular to students that cram a lot. It is best applied to information that does not need full processing since it just revolves around selecting which chunks of words need to be remembered and understood.

Another method is called meta guiding by using your finger or a pen to guide the eyes to land on a specific string. As a result distraction is decreased and focus on the words increases. This also helps from consciously rereading and back skipping, since the pointer should only move forward or stop.

Another recommended technique uses peripheral vision. Perceptual expansion, as it is commonly know, is essentially looking at the text at a wider range of visual focus to cover more words at a time. It works with the premise that the brain can absorb visual information and translates it into something that can be understood with little effort. With perceptual expansion, reading is not limited to focusing on one line of text at a time.

Disruption of focus and daydreaming can also slow down the processing of a given material. Overall this increases study time and is a very bad habit. This all requires a lot of focus and destroys these bad habits. This whole new method is not natural and will lower down comprehension but with enough practice, it should get better.

Increasing speed in absorbing text seems like a very useful skill, but there will always be counter arguments to an idea that says it is possible to read a 1000 wmp without comprehension being compromised. It does really seem unlikely, but nonetheless it helps to giving it a shot. Admittedly, it should be very useful for material that is not very important.

Increased reading speed is definitely a concept that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It is a great venture to be able to read that much given that information is always growing per millisecond in this day and age. But by mental default, the more words one reads at the shortest possible time will directly affect comprehension. To think that comprehension is really the point of it all in the first place.