4 Steps to Read Difficult Texts Faster (Academic Speed Reading Comprehension)

so it's basically a given that when you're studying you're going to have to do a lot of reading so i'm going to be sharing with you some of the tricks that i use to make sure that i can read very quickly and maintain my focus so that i'm not just reading the same passage of text over and over and over again wasting my time and then getting progressively more tired for those of you that don't know me i'm dr justin i'm a medical doctor and a learning and productivity coach now i know that i'm going

to have to do a lot of reading and i'm going to have to focus in a lot if there's anything that's going to waste time in this process which is already going to take me several hours it's going to be losing focus and having to re-read sections in fact if you time yourself for let's say 20 or 30 minutes you might find that half or more of that time is actually spent on just trying to regain your focus which is actually very frustrating one of the things about reading quickly is that there is a technique

to reading quickly and then there is a strategy to reading quickly and the technique of reading quickly ends up being actually less important than the strategy when it comes to more difficult texts so for example if you're reading a easy like year 4 year 5 like a children's book then your reading technique is the thing that is probably the most limiting step for you because the time it takes to process the information is is low there are basic sentences with basic syntax and the information is clear and obvious and almost a little bit intuitive so

when we know what to expect from what we're reading and if it's predictable and if the information is simple if the words that are used are small then it's much easier for our brain to process this and this is you know relatively obvious the thing that i have a problem with is that a lot of people will teach students that are trying to read textbooks that are much more advanced and they'll teach them to read faster relying on the reading technique rather than the reading strategy and the thing is that at a certain point the

importance of technique actually drops by a lot because the time it takes actually process information gets longer and longer and longer to the point where it doesn't really matter how fast or slow you're reading the thing that actually makes the biggest difference is how long does it take for your brain to kind of figure out what's going on piece it all together and how long can you actually maintain that concentration for because piecing things together is more energy consuming process and so a lot of people can't speed read for more than a few minutes so

way back in 2009 2010 when i first started looking into how to speed read i got my reading speed pretty high a thousand words per minute but it was honestly quite unsustainable um i would be exhausted after just a few minutes of reading at that speed uh and even though now i can still comfortably maintain it uh you know maintain a speed of around maybe five or six hundred without having to concentrate too hard i don't find myself resorting to those techniques as heavily as i thought i would going into it now the biggest thing

is actually about the strategy so i'll cover some of the technique very briefly just so that you're aware because it does help but then i'll talk more about the strategy and how you can structure your learning and set things up to make it easier so you can see that i've got some text here that i'm going to be reading through and i'm demonstrating and you'll probably notice already a few things about how i've laid out this text and if you're really interested to know about my app stacks then leave a comment and i might do

a video on that too you'll find that my app stack is actually really simple it used to be super complicated but i got rid of really a lot of those apps that weren't doing much uh so the technology i used to facilitate my learning is actually surprisingly very minimal so in terms of reading technique one of the things that's often talked about is reducing what's called sub vocalization so localization is what i'm doing right now i'm just talking sub-vocalization exists in a couple different forms a very beginner level of sub-vocalization is actually muttering the words

out loud so if we were to take this sentence right here it says certainly blah blah blah sub-vocalizing might sound like this certainly in addition to the lack of consideration of relation aspects of social context the lack of significant impact of many programs will be a reflection of a lack of consideration of social knowledge within the white school culture okay so what i'm doing now is i'm not really enunciating the words properly and i'm not taking time to really vocalize it properly but i am sort of mouthing the words and it can be silent just

essentially reading it but quietly and very very quickly and so the time save of not vocalizing instead just sub vocalizing is that we don't have to wait for us to properly form the words and so we can read a little bit faster and so straight away from going from vocalization to sub-vocalization uh you will have a speed increase of maybe 10 to 20 however most people are already able to not need to read through vocalization the next level of sub-vocalization is your mouth is not moving but you're still reading it inside your brain so your

mind is reading it silently so on the outside it doesn't look any different but in my head i'm still kind of reading it so i'm doing the same sub vocalization that i was doing through my mouth but i'm doing it in my brain now that's a little bit faster still because i don't have to even wait for my mouth to kind of muddle everything out however that does put a hard cap on how fast that you can read a lot of techniques around reading technique and speed reading focus on how to reduce subvocalization the problem

is though sub vocalization is also associated with easier processing so it reduces what's known as cognitive load and allows it to be a little bit more manageable so when you're reading it's easier to process the information by subvocalizing so subvocalizing isn't necessarily a negative thing it does make you slower but it also makes it easier to process information so subvocalization is actually strategy that we want to use we don't want to start vocalize when the text is not very important but we want to sub-vocalize in areas where we know it's more dense to process because

trying to process it without subvocalization you may be able to read the words faster but would actually take you longer to learn from it which means that you might end up having to reread the same thing three or four times and then on the fourth time you probably end up sub-vocalizing it anyway because you're just frustrated from having to re-read it so much and all of this wastes energy and it reduces your focus so sub vocalization we want to learn how we can turn it off but we also want to know that we it's not

necessarily a bad thing we want to be able to use it when we can and that's part of the strategy that i'll talk about soon how do you turn it off well there's a number of different ways some people will say to hum in your mind as you're doing or you can hum out loud as you're doing it just imagining sort of silence or trying to sort of count or something while you like in your head while you're reading personally i find that maybe the only thing that really works there is the humming in your

mind but i don't find that that is a very effective way of training sub-vocalization and i trained that for about a week or so ten plus years ago when i first got into this and i found it to be number one very boring but number two not a very sustainable way of practicing and you don't actually need to do that because there's another aspect of reading technique that is actually more important which is grouping words together so your eye when you're looking at something has the ability obviously to see more than just like a single

point you know there's a certain width at which your eye is able to look and this width is actually defined by a area on the back of your eye on the retina which is especially dense and has a lot of basically nerve fibers that detect light and can process it light that is centered right there which is right in the center of your vision is processed much more and much more information comes in that's why your peripheral vision is usually much blurrier and you can't really focus on anything more than just like a very narrow

cone within your central vision what often happens when we are reading is that we are really really intense with our reading and then what that causes is a constriction of our pupils which makes it so that that cone gets even narrower what we want to do is we want to be a little bit more relaxed by relaxing our eyes a little bit more that people enlarges a little bit more and allows a little bit more light to come in and so it just increases that peripheral vision just by a touch not by much but just

a little bit and when you read a little bit more relaxed you'll be able to find that you're able to see a few more words at the same time so instead of reading this paragraph certainly in addition to the lack of consideration of relational aspects of social context i would read this potentially if i'm just starting out i would put my eye relaxedly in the middle between the words certainly and in and then i'd be able to in a single go read both words certainly in and then i'll be able to read edition two and

then lilac so by putting my eye here here and then here i'm able to read six words with three different eye positions and grouping words automatically shuts off sub-vocalization because you can't pronounce two words simultaneously in your mind uh we're turning our sub-localization while we are reducing the amount of words that we need to read by grouping the words together grouping words is also more energy-efficient so instead of just going through and reading every single word when you group words you can group the words that you can tell a little bit more difficult to process

a very easy way of doing this is just the number of letters in the word so i know that the word in to and the are words that are very easy to process in fact i can read certainly in addition all at once by gently placing my eye here and boom i can take in this group of words at the same time now it might take a little bit longer ten percent longer to read a group of three words than it would to read a single word so let's say it takes point one seconds to

read the word certainly it might take point zero point one five seconds to read certainly in addition so your eye is going to be moving slower however the amount of information you're taking in is actually faster so just because you're grouping let's say three or four words together at a time doesn't mean that your reading speed is increased by three to four times it doesn't really scale that way because your eye is not moving at that same speed instead if you're grouping three or four words at the same time you may be able to increase

your reading speed by maybe 60 or 70 or 80 percent so grouping works together is actually probably the most time efficient energy efficient and practically useful technique when it comes to speed reading high level academic texts like you'd find in a textbook personally as someone that does really a lot of reading on a daily and weekly basis grouping is the only actual reading technique that i use or rely on it's very rare for me to actively think about turning off subvocalization when i group words together sub-vocalization turns off automatically if you're first starting out on

this you will need to practice you may need to practice for a few hours to really get the hang of it but once you get the hang of it it just becomes an automatic thing and your brain just gets better and better at it now this is really only for non-fiction books by the way if you're reading a fiction book yeah sub-vocalize whatever you want to do read word for word for word you want to immerse yourself in the story this is really just when your goal is rapid information consumption so that's the reading technique

side of things is that we're grouping the words together the strategy comes from when we use that technique so ideally what we want to do is we want to be able to skip through the information that is not very meaningful and we want to sub-vocalize on the areas that we know are the most difficult so what that means that we're saving energy where we don't need to be thinking so hard and then we're using that energy in a productive way to get maximum learning and we're actually using sub-vocalization as a tool so all we do

there is we turn on and off the grouping so for example if i'm going through this text i can without even reading it tell that there are certain aspects of this text that are going to be a little bit denser based on the amount of big words that are coming up so for example i can tell that maybe this area here is a little bit denser but for example maybe this area seems a little bit easier this area seems a little bit easier this seems a little bit easier this seems a little bit easier so

you can see there are little pockets where i can group and this is very important so you should be reading in these very discrete concentrated bursts of speed you're rapidly sprinting from point to point to point the second part of the strategy is that you need to give yourself sufficient pause as i mentioned early on one of the biggest things that's going to hold you back is actually how long it takes for you to process the information as well as how tired you get and how long you can sustain that for there's no point being

able to read a thousand words per minute but then five minutes later you need to take a 15 minute rest you may as well have read at 300 words per minute but then still be energetic enough to go for an additional three or four minutes and then you would have actually read and consumed more in the amount of time so taking strategic processing breaks and pauses is an important part of the technique what that means is that between my sprints of reading i'm going to stop pause think about what it is that i've just read

kind of make a mental log of kind of of what's going on and the important thing is spend maybe three or four seconds kind of thinking about where this text is likely to take me i'm kind of trying to predict where this text is going and what information i'm going to consume so you remember when i said that reading a really easy book makes it easy to read because it's predictable the sentence is predictable the story is predictable the words that are used are not particularly fancy it's easy because your mind can already kind of

guess what's going to come next in highly academic text the processing time is often so long that it's right up against the reading time so every word you read is being processed so you're never really giving your brain enough space to think ahead of where your reading is to get an idea about what might be coming next taking these processing breaks gives you the ability to just think about what might be coming next and you'll find that that makes reading it actually much easier and much smoother and much more effortless so what that might look

like is when i'm reading just going through and saying okay so i'm going to read through this block starting from here down and i'll just start now and i'm going to be grouping and sprinting and subvocalizing wherever i need to and what i will do is i will show you how i'm doing this with literal examples instead of vocalizing it in my mind i will sub-vocalize it out loud so that means that you can see when i'm grouping because i'll be silent and then where i'm sub-vocalizing because i will say it out loud into the

mic and you can follow along with me to see that pattern of bursts and you'll find that the bursts are very short uh but they're very frequent and i want you to note when i'm doing my pause so let me let me demonstrate certainly in addition relational aspects of programs reflect consideration norms culture consideration policies practice artifacts classrooms school environment okay so i've just read up to here okay so you can see that i basically have grouped and then subvocalized individual kind of keywords within that and i'm piecing it together now at about this point

because my reading speed is relatively fast at about this point i'm just going to take my break and i'm just going to think about what i've just read cool so i know that this paragraph because you probably weren't following along is talking about the different aspects of social and emotional learning and the programs that are used in school and the influence that different things like school culture and classroom environments can have on that so i know that the next part of this article is probably going to give me well i know that it says for

example an example of these wider influences and then the rest of the narrative might talk a little bit about different models or frameworks or pros and cons or benefits and i'm expecting it to elaborate on that very straightforward i'm not making any crazy predictions or any crazy hypotheses it's just maybe three or four or five seconds to just stop think understand process it cool ready to move on and you may want to write a few notes at that time as you go as well using that break don't be afraid to take these breaks to really

process it properly in order to move on if there was something that was new in here that i really thought was conceptually important i may make a reference to that in my room depending on my workflow if i'm studying i may chuck it into my mind map so every now and again i'll update my mind map as i go again these are all techniques that i i don't really have time to well there's a lot of me right there these are all techniques that i don't have time to really go into right now in this

video but you know those of you that have been following my other videos you'll see me demonstrate this multiple different times uh in multiple different contexts so the the final part of this so we've covered the techniques such as grouping the words together and using sub-vocalization strategically and the strategy behind going in bursts using and then not using grouping of words and and again if you're just starting there's a lot of effort that goes into turning on and off grouping of words but again you practice for a few hours and you that'll become easier and

easier and faster until you don't even have to think about it and then taking those processing breaks to really collect process that information make a few notes whatever you want to do and then just have a quick prediction about what's going to come next uh and then that is actually going to reduce the amount energy that you need to use it's going to allow you to maintain a moderately high speed for a lot longer and it's going to mean that your retention is actually really high going through it so using this technique i can actually

maintain this type of reading for several hours in fact i'm recording this video right now but i've actually just i've actually been reading for the last four and a half hours already the final tiny little tip and i'm sure you've noticed is just a little few technical things uh if it is possible and this is another reason i like using epub format is to make it a very narrow field so rather than moving your eye from left to right left to right and down the page by grouping it like this it allows me to read

each line in just one or two eye positions so instead of having to go imagine if the line was you know this long instead of going one two three four five eye positions laterally and then moving down to the next line and grouping grouping grouping grouping grouping uh i can just go group group group group group group group so yes i'm scrolling more but it is easier on my eye i'm not having to move my eye across like an entire screen or an entire page i can generally keep my eye just between toggling between two

general locations as i'm coming down and these little little things just allow me to save a little bit more energy and preserve my reading stamina and the other thing is just i set the background of this to a gray and i've got flux turned on at the moment with reduced eye strain turned on and that just allows me to again uh save a little bit of that eye energy and read for a little bit longer as well so just a few techniques and tips and strategies on how you can read a little bit more effectively

i hope you enjoyed that if you're interested in learning a little bit more about how i study and how i've trained thousands of other students to study and achieve top grades i go through my end-to-end process of exactly what i do from beginning day one all the way up to after the exams in my course so if you're interested you can check the description down below and learn more about that if you liked it leave a like if you have any questions about this or if you've got any experiences of your own then leave a

comment down below i'd love to hear about it if you like hearing or learning about this type of content then leave a subscribe i'd really appreciate it but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] you