How to Coach Yourself and Others Happiness Is No Accident

2) Stop Sub vocalizing When you started to read you probably read out loud. Your elementary school teacher wanted you to read the book and say the words aloud. After you mastered this skill, you were told to simply say the words inside your head and read quietly. This is where most reading education and skill levels end. To move to a new level you need to stop sounding the words inside your head or sub vocalizing. Sub vocalizing takes time, more time than is necessary to comprehend the words you are reading. It is almost impossible to go much beyond 400 or 500 words while sub vocalizing. Instead you need to train yourself to read without hearing the words in your head. But for most people this has become such an ingrained reading habit that they don’t realize that sub vocalization is a distinct process to comprehension. If I read at around a thousand words per minute, there is no way I could hear the words in my head while trying to process them. Instead I simply see the word and my brain automatically constructs what has been written. I’ll understand a line of text that I looked over in a second, even though it may have taken at least five just to say the words in my head. Since most people currently can’t separate the sub vocalization from comprehension, they are locked in at a rate of about 400-500 words. Moving beyond that rate requires that you practice reading faster than you can actually read. Edit: I’ve done a follow-up to explain sub vocalization more as I think this post may have confused people a little. Check it out here: Speed Reading Follow-Up 3) Practice Reading Practice reading doesn’t mean reading. Practice reading involves reading faster than you can actually read. Chances are you won’t comprehend much of what you are reading because your brain is so used to going at a slower rate and sub vocalizing. The point is simply to see the text faster than you can read so you can untie the habit of sounding the words as you comprehend them. You can start doing this by taking out a timer or a stop watch and simply viewing as much text in a book as possible in one minute. Use a book you haven’t read before to ensure your brain is actually practicing instead of relying on memory. Mark out where you started and stopped. Count the number of words per line (use a quick average) and then the number of lines you actually read in the book to compute your practice reading rate. Once you get used to practice reading at a high rate that you can’t comprehend, you should slowly be able to actually comprehend at a slightly slower rate but still faster than if you sub vocalized. I would often practice read at between 1500 and 1800 words per minute, and although I lacked comprehension skill, I could maintain it at about 900-1000, over double what I had done when I sub vocalized. 14

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