I have difficulty limiting the amount of time I spend on reading (C11).
Reading is a daily and very time consuming activity. Most people have never really reflected on their own reading skills, since this is a basic skill that you have learned at a relatively early age. After that age, your reading pace quickens primarily because you are more experienced in reading rather than that you have improved your technique. Quantity, however, rarely triggers quality. This Skill Sheet discusses a number of characteristics and techniques to improve your reading speed. Speed reading works on the premise that your brain processes pictures and not words (Turley, 1989). But always remember the first rule of speed reading: the quickest read is once you have been able to select out irrelevant material; that takes no time and always beats brainless speed reading (C2, C4).
Slow and quick reading
The average reading speed is around 230 words per minute. But most people are capable of reading at least as fast as 500 words per minute. They are "held back" by bad reading habits. Slow readers also generally read with poor comprehension (Fry, 1963). This is because reading and understanding a complex sentence requires the reader to hold the information in their short term memory (B6). By reading slowly it becomes harder for the reader to keep the information in the memory, and therefore harder to understand. It is accepted that slow readers can actually increase their comprehension by learning to read faster - until a certain limit (Bell, 2001). Conversely, of course, poor comprehension can also explain for slow reading. Everybody has the experience that slow reading in a foreign language is the necessary start of a learning curve. The same applies to a new area of research or another scientific discipline: you start off with slowly going through texts, trying to identify the most important concepts, and if needed looking them up in dictionaries or glossaries. After you have mastered these phases, your reading speed will increase automatically. So slow reading is not always a bad thing. On the contrary, it represents a very functional phase in research and learning (The Challenge, Part I). "Comprehension is achieved by reading neither too fast nor too slow" (Coady, 1979). Once you are more acquainted with a language or an intellectual area, improving the quality of your reading is never a bad thing. That is what speed reading is basically about. Some pointers can be given on how you could try to speed up your reading speed in Table C.11.
