Comprehension must come first. Instead of pushing your speed while simply trying to retain your comprehension, faster reading will come as the natural result of better comprehension. Rather than focusing on speed reading, you will be focusing on speed comprehension.
You haven’t read anything until you’ve comprehended it.
Reading is all about comprehension. Reading without comprehension is like reading with your eyes closed. Comprehension means more than just understanding words and definitions; it means understanding the ideas being communicated.
To stop regressing, you must stop your reason for doing it. And what causes regression is reading without comprehension.
But you’ll find the more you visualize and focus on the real meaning of what you read, the less you will want to subvocalize.
When you encounter harder or unfamiliar material, you need to automatically slow down and also read shorter word-groups, just as you would switch to a lower gear and cover less distance with each rotation of your bicycle pedal.
Reading whole ideas increases your reading speed in two ways: Concentrating on the bigger picture results in processing more meaningful information. Taking in more words at a time results in reading more words per minute.
short, the process of reading with the right brain consists of reading each sentence not as a list of individual words or as a string of sounds, but as a set of larger ideas which can then be linked together into the complete meaning of the entire sentence; this enables you to focus on the larger conceptual nature of what you are reading rather than the individual textual components.
Reading IS comprehension. That means comprehension is not just a part of reading, it is all that reading is. If we read text with fifty percent comprehension, then we are only reading fifty percent of the text. The rest of the text is only looked at—and maybe sounded out—but not “read.”
With practice, the habit of seeing text as larger meaningful ideas should become internalized and unconscious and assist in making the most use of our finite amounts of cognitive energy.
If your improvement slows down or plateaus, realize it’s still all forward progress, and that the plateau is just something to pass through on the way to your goal.