One Week of Reading

Well, I have been trying to read faster for about a week. My progress has been . . . disappointing. Granted, I have not actually “practiced” that much, but I have done a fair bit of regular reading, and most of the time I am conscious of trying to read faster. However, according to the first resource I consumed since embarking on this speed-reading adventure, I should spend time practicing if I really want to get fast.

I believe I have at least identified my main problem areas. These areas are subvocalization (“speaking” words in your head) and backtracking. I think subvocalization is definitely my biggest hurdle, and I’m really not sure how I will overcome it, but I am certainly going to try. I believe the first thing I’m going to try doing is just looking at words as fast as I can for a while, and see if that improves my speed of comprehension.

For reference, below is a screenshot of another test I took at freereadingtest.com. I only got 303 wpm and 75% accuracy. Ever so slightly better than last week, but nothing remarkable. Hopefully next week is more encouraging!