This page explains various phrases. Feel free to contact SpeedReadingLounge if you have any questions. We will answer as quickly as possible.
Affirmations
Affirmations will help set a goal for your speed reading efforts and communicate them to your unconsciousness. Best practice is saying “I will read faster every day” or I will comprehend more every day”. Note that practising techniques regularly will make up the other half of the journey.
Anticipation
Fast readers only need a few letters to recognize a word, or a phrase. The brain automatically completes the rest of a word. It also works with missing letters, whereas the meaning is still recognizable.
Bad Reading Habits
Many readers are accustomed to reading habits that let them go back in text (regression), pronounce single words in their head or they easily get distracted by the activities happening around them. It’s basically everything that may stop you from reading efficiently.
Comprehension
You can certainly fly over a text with incredible speed. But, what can you recall? The goal is to steadily improve comprehension while increasing reading speeds.
Concentration & Focus
A type of bad reading habits. Lack of sleep, nutrition poor in vitamins, any kind of stress, and distractions can hold you back from fully reaching your reading speed and comprehension. The goal is to minimize distraction and focus on the task ahead.
Conceptualizing
An interesting concept that focuses on visualizing words, word groups and then paragraphs or even pages. Connect words with images or learn the meaning of prefixes and suffixes to quickly understand nuances in meanings or unknown words.
Eye Relaxations
Eyes are weak muscles and get tired quickly. See the video page and scroll down for eye relaxation exercises to refresh them quickly.
Fixation
Refers to the amount of focus stops you need in order to understand what’s being written in one single line. The goal is to minimize these fixations as much as possible to increase reading speed.
Hand Pacing
A technique to increase speed using a pointer tool, which is either your finger, hand or a pen. Place it underneath a word and move or hop along the line. Learn more here.
Memory Techniques
Can you remember numbers, names easily? Can you memorize things in a certain order? There are techniques to do so, and visualization plays an important role here.
Skimming and Scanning
A major fast reading technique to quickly overview a book, article or piece of content to trigger main ideas and reading goals. You can skim & scan for numbers, words, dates, infographics, headlines and much more. You can dig a little bit deeper into interesting points, but move on quickly.
Fast Reading Patterns
Patterns refer to more advanced fast reading techniques, where the reader applies specific moving patterns to move across a page in order to gather information.
Reading Distractions
Influences from the outer or inner environment with the effect of distracting you from performing well. It can be noises or restless thinking. Control them to stay focused.
Reading Speed
The time you need to read a text. It’s roughly minutes divided by total words. Say you have a 400 word article and you read it in 1 minute, then your reading speed is 400 words per minute (wpm) respectively 200 wpm when taking 2 minutes.
Recalling
Reading only makes sense when you can remember what you actually have read. The goal is to permanently improve your recalls. Also see memory techniques.
Regression
You can’t remember what’s been written a few lines up and need to re-read it? That’s being understood as regression, to go back in text repeatedly. It’s a bad reading habit, but can be overcome.
Repetition
What ever you want to learn you probably need to do it more than once to master it. Repetition is the key to improve steadily.
Scanning
A synonym to skimming. Scan content for valuable information to separate interesting from unimportant content.
Skimming
Similar to previewing, but much faster. It’s like flying above the ground to get an overall impression on what’s going on and to decide whether to read an article or move on.
Speed Reading Test
The average reading speed for standard content ranges between 220 and 300 words per minute. You can test your speed to get a point of reference. See the side bar for the link.
Subvocalization
Do you pronounce the words while reading them? That’s called subvocalization. The goal is to stop it and visualize information and leave this bad reading habit behind.
Visualization
To see words and phrases as dynamic images and understand their meaning more colorful and faster.
Word Group Reading
Instead of reading word by word you try to see a specific word group or even a whole paragraph and understand their meaning.
Please add your question or any terminology in the comments below!