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How To Finish Reading A Book Fast

You read because you love it and also want to better yourself. What you want is a way to preserve the pleasure of reading, but also utilize all precious minutes in today’s busy society.

And since none of us are about to get a fairy godmother who’ll just wave a wand and, bam, increase our reading speed by 100%, I’ve put together some real tips on how to finish reading a book fast.   best ereadersPlay Video

There’s no reason you can’t maintain comprehension and power through that endless to-be-read list. We want our cake and we’re going to eat it too. 

1. Make Sure Your Environment Is Conducive To Focusing

No matter how good a book is, it’s easy for your mind to wander and your eyes to bounce all over the page if the background noise is distracting you.

Relaxing at a coffee shop with a book and that latte seemed like a good idea at a time. And, yes! Still, do that if you like.

But the background chaos will drag your attention away from your text, so don’t expect to read fast in that environment.

If you minimize distractions, your reading time will be way more productive. You’ll read faster and maintain focus on the content.

Try reading in a quiet room or, if you don’t have that option, put on headphones with either soft white-noise playing and or use them to block out the sounds around you.

2. Stop Pronouncing Words In Your Head

When reading silently, we tend to pronounce the entire word in our head as if we needed to say them out loud. But good news! You don’t need to say the words out loud.

You can simply view the shape of the word, know what it is, and continue. Once you cut out that step of sounding out the words to yourself in your head, you can process words much faster.

A way to train yourself to cut out that “inner voice” is to try an app like Spreeder. It shows you one or two words at a time and you can increase the speeds.

This is just a demo version but gives you an idea on how to start training your mind. This will take focus to learn how to do since you’ve got decades of ingrained reading habits to unravel, but it’s very possible!

I was comfortably doing 600 words per minute while studies show the average reader comes in under 300 words per minute. 

3. Skip Reading The Small Words

When presented with the concept of skim-reading, you tend to assume you need to skip whole paragraphs or just read every second sentence. That will make comprehension a nightmare.

Try, instead, skipping just the small words. We’re talking words like a, it, am, and the.

I did a fun test recently where you were given a paragraph with only the first and last letters of each word printed. The middle of the words was missing.

It’s still possible to read the entire thing because your brain automatically filled in the missing letters.

So don’t underestimate your brain’s ability to fill in the gaps! And this is much more logical than skipping whole paragraphs.