Before I officially became a 7sage/trainer student, I dabbled around on a few other forums and found that many instructors suggest using a website called Speedo to increase reading speed. It is designed on the premise that the subconscious mind prohibits people from reaching their reading speed potential due to the subconscious "reading aloud" even when one is reading silently. Learning to ignore that inner voice allows u to take in what u physically see which can be four or more words at a time, rather than reading the one word at a time that you hear in your head. I tried it for a while and it seemed to work but later felt it was unnecessary. What do you guys think? Has anyone done this long term and reaped positive mind blowing results in RC?
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And how to tame this wild breed of reading beast? Oh ho ho. With many lashes of intellect and hours of practice.
- What's the overall main idea of the passage? (This should be self-evident since the first question usually asks you of this).
- Pay attention to specific references. You have this one source that said this one thing, a counter, and then this third perspective. Wait, what? Mark it.
- Enumerate your paragraphs! Please, please do this. It makes going back to the passage easier and more fluid (if you have to). A big mistake that people do (yes, I was guilty of this too) was to go back to a specific point in the passage and ended up reading the whole damn thing all over again. You end up more confused and will kill precious minutes doing so.
- Break up the central idea of each paragraph and mentally summarize what you just read.
- Analyze the relationship between paragraphs.
If you're not accustomed to dense reading, there are plenty of ancillary resources that may help. (There are plenty of threads within 7sage that are filled with great recommendations). But really? Doing tons of reading comprehension passages is pretty much a guaranteed way of improving.
I actually like the app Elevate, especially the “Processing" exercise. It appears to be a speed reading exercise, but it’s really developing the skill of processing what we read into our short term memory. Check it out.
If it's familiarity with subject matter you're looking for, podcasts are also a great option.
For lit/arts strugglers, check out http://www.aldaily.com/ . Happy to see they haven't changed their website since 2004 (when I frequented the site).