Well, you are not alone.

I’m 60 now, but I spent many years hating how slow I read. I had so many interests in things I’d love to read about… but my slow reading made this a torturously long assignment.

When I was in college, I bought books at the school bookstore that promised to teach me to read faster. But after giving it the “old college try” I just didn’t understand why I couldn’t pick this up from speed reading. I went to an adult school night class that used a tachistoscope (a mechanical device that displayed groups of words in a given space) to teach speed reading. But even though it seemed like I was reading a bit faster while using this machine, it still had no effect on my regular reading. Later I bought a computer software and tried various websites that promised to improve my reading speed… but nothing really worked. Why couldn’t I do this?

With all of these methods, I found that I could increase my speed a bit, but only at the expense of my comprehension. Each course suggested that I try to see more words in each glance. “Seeing more words” had something to do with expanding my “span of vision,” exercising my eyes to move faster, or strengthening my peripheral vision. Sure I could see more words at once, but only if I didn’t care about comprehension…which was something courses often told me I could safely ignore; they said not to worry because the understanding part would come later. . Well…

I thought it must be stupid.

By now I realized that I must have a slow brain. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to read faster.

Then one day, sitting in my backyard reading a book, I stopped, absolutely fed up. I was staring at the page, disgusted with myself… when I suddenly realized that words almost always fit into short, meaningful sentences, and each of these sentences could be instantly understood with a single glance, like all a thought.

Then I realized… Reading faster was about UNDERSTANDING faster, and I could understand faster by reading whole thoughts at once.

I took a pencil and marked bars to separate the text into meaningful sentences. Then upon re-reading the page, I instantly saw how much easier and faster I was able to understand.

The key to reading faster was ‘thought units’.

They were all partly right; you need to read several words at once to read faster… but they have to be meaningful groups of words; complete units of thought, or “thought units.” I was impressed enough with the effectiveness of this that I built a website that displayed text with these units of thought already highlighted. While practicing with this site, I saw a rapid increase in my reading speed (and comprehension).

But this improvement was still not constant… Also, it seemed that I was still hearing some of the words in my head, so it seemed that this vocalization would continue to limit my reading speed.

So what was the key to reading units of thought?

Visualizing. This was the key. I found that if I concentrated on seeing in my imagination the meaning of each unit of thought, suddenly I was reading IDEAS instead of words, and the vocalization would just disappear.

When I say ‘see’, I don’t mean exact or detailed pictures, even a vague fuzzy conceptual idea felt like shining a flashlight on the information. Ideas jumped off the page into my mind.

The real key was simply concentrating on seeing the meaning of what I was reading, and this replaced hearing the sounds.

Was it easy now?

No… But now it was possible! I think of it like learning to ride a bike. It takes practice, some experimentation, and persistence… but I think almost anyone can learn it. And once you learn, it’s a lot faster (and more fun).

Then, once reading thought units became a habit, he moved on to regular reading. It still required concentration, of course, because it was new, and because faster reading obviously required faster thinking. Maybe it was more like learning to ride a unicycle than a bike, but it was still worth it, when I could FLY through text, taking in whole IDEAS at once.

your training wheels

I continued to develop this site into a free course that anyone could use. I considered it something like the wheels of a bicycle; giving assistance while the user developed his new ability.

For over 100 years, reading teachers have suggested reading in ‘sentences’, ‘word groups’, ‘chunks’, etc. But only by reading meaningful thought units is this really possible… and only by concentrating on visualizing these thought units can you really move to the next level of reading.