<p>Yup there's quite a few. The most important thing is to read something everyday even if just for a bit this way you practice the techniques and you get better at it.</p>
<p>A bit part of being able to read faster is knowing what you're going to read before hand. Fact of the matter is that if the material isn't engaging, and if you have no idea what you're going to be reading it isn't going to interest you in the slightest and you're going to end up struggling to read it. So this involves active reading.</p>
<p>Active Reading:
Book Preview
1. Read both covers, inside and out.
2. Read everything before Chap 1 (this includes Introduction, Preface, Table of Contents, etc.)
3. For nonfiction, read the conclusion (Epilogue, Coda, etc.). For fiction you don't do this part.
4. Read Chapter 1 (if you need more information or if it looks introductory).</p>
<p>And as you preview, ask yourself these type of questions:
1. Who is the author and what is the author's qualifications?
2. What are the people, places, ideas in this book about?
3. What's your purpose in reading this book and the author's purpose in writing this book?</p>
<p>Here are the techniques that start where you start working with your hand-eye coordination.
-Long underline
1. Place on hand under the first line of text, so that three or four fingertips are under the first words to be read.
2. Move your hand smoothly under the line, leading your ryees across the page as you read the words above your fingers.
3. At the end of the line, bring your hand smoothly and quickly down under the beginning of the next line without lifting your hand from the page.
4. Keep your hand relaxed and comfortable; don't press to hard on the page.</p>
<p>This technique allows you to eliminate common problems such as skipping words or reading word by word. It also keeps your eyes focused, preventing you from drifting or losing your place. And helps you achieve an appropriate increase in speed.</p>
<p>To test this out you can test your reading speed (I showed you how to do this in the first post) before and after doing the Long underline technique.</p>
<p>You also want to write down your reading speed everytime you time yourself because that's the only way you'll really know if you're improving or not.</p>
<p>The next step is called Short Underline. Use the same procedure as Long Underline, but shorten the stroke of your hand, so that your hand underlines only the middle two thirds of every line. So instead of your 3 or 4 fingers starting off at the beginning of the line you go one third of the way then stop at two thirds of the way (instead of stopping at the end of the line like in the other technique).</p>
<p>Of course those are just speed reading techniques.</p>
<p>A comprehension technique called Tellbacks requires you to stop reading after 5-10 minutes and describe in your own words the events you've just read about. This allows you to remember all the things you've just read and gives you an idea of how your reading speed, and comprehension are going along.</p>
<p>Normally what you would do is give yourself a minute to do the speed reading test. After the minute is up and you mark the last line instead of calculating your speed you do a tellback and then rate the tell back from 1 thru 5 (1 being the lowest, 5 being the best) and then you calculate your reading speed.</p>
<p>And two more techniques that help to push you along.</p>
<p>This one is called Mild Push. Just push your hand across the page a little faster when doing the Long/Short Underline technique than your comfortable reading speed. This allows you to increase your reading speed and look at your comprehension. If you do this and your comprehension is suffering then take it down a notch. You're not supposed to go super fast here, it's just a slight push.</p>
<p>Best analogy I could use is if people that want to run faster. They have to practice running but they also have to practice running at faster speeds and for longer periods of time if they ever want to improve on their current running speed. But they don't do it right away, they do it gradually.</p>
<p>The other technique is called Heavy Push. This involves just training your eye muscles. You don't have to understand what you're reading at all for this. Simply take a book, put it upside down (since it doesn't matter whether you understand or not) and take page that's full of text. Then time yourself for 30 seconds and see how far down the page you can go doing long/short underline. The idea is you want to train your eye to go down the page as fast as you can so they can get in the habit of doing it. After doing this for like 3-5 times consecutively you can then put the book the regular way and go thru the lines using heavy push again and just test to see how fast you can go down a page in 30 seconds.</p>
<p>Like I said, I've found my reading speed increase from 240 to 390 WPM. It takes practice and patience. You're not going to get it all write away. And you gotta do it step by step. First practice Long underline then when you're used to that move on to Short underline. And then try the other techniques. Just remember you always want to read in Mild Push form this way you're constantly testing your speed reading and comprehension skills. It works trust me. Practice and patience is all it takes.</p>