Nothing is more surprising to the new college student than the amount of reading required. Many college students find themselves overwhelmed. One frustrated freshman striving lard to keep up blurted, "Just as I think I'm caught up, there's more! It never ends!" You may feel the same way. Since everyone knows how to read, you may begin to wonder what's wrong with you. You may begin to think that you aren't working hard enough, or worse, that you aren't smart enough for college and that the work is beyond you. You may find yourself resentfully feeling that your instructors are trying to break you with their totally unreasonable reading assignments.

Usually, the problem is not really a lack of intelligence on your part or a punishing plan by your instructors. The real problem is that the reading skills which carried you through elementary and high school are not adequate to meet the requirements of college. You need bring your reading skills up to the college level. This chapter can help you to pinpoint some of the common problem areas and help you to improve your reading habits.

Anyone can become a more competent reader. As in anything else, you need to apply certain principles and you need to practice. Before you start learning more reading techniques, you need to know where you are as a reader. That is, you need to assess your existing ability. You need to know approximately how fast you read and if you have any inefficient reading habits that are slowing you down.

How You Can Check Your Reading Speed: Words Per Minute

Reading speed is measured in words per minute. There is a wide range in the speed with which different people read. The average American reads between 100 and 300 words per minute. At the higher speed levels a number of people can read 800 words per minute. Most college students need to be able to read only about 250 words per minute to effectively handle their reading assignments. How do you compare with the average? Take a few minutes to estimate the number of words-per-minute you can read. Use the following method. Get a friend with a watch to help you. Select a full page of material in your textbook, count all the words in five full lines, and divide by five. This gives you the average number of words in a line. Multiply this by the number of lines on the page. This will give you the number of words per page. Now have your friend time you, for two minutes, reading from the page selected. Have your friend call out "begin" and "stop". Divide the number of words you have read by two. This will give you, approximately, the number of words per minute that you read. Now you know how fast you read. If you find that you are reading more slowly than you would like-to, you may have some inefficient reading habits that you are not even fully aware of.

How You Can Check Yourself For Inefficient Reading Habits

The following unconscious inefficient habits can have a tremendous effect on your reading speed and ability.

Verbalizing. If you have this inefficient habit, you read the words out load or in your throat. To check this, put your fingers lightly on your voice box as you read. If you feel a faint tremor, you are doing it. You are also verbalizing if you pronounce each word in your mind. Verbalizing slows you down considerably and decreases your understanding. If you are concentrating only on the words, you can be distracted from their meaning.

Regressing. If you find yourself immediately going back over part of the sentence that you have just read you are regressing. Some regressing is good, i.e., if you don’t understand what you have just read, it’s good to go back over it again. But, a habit of regressing at every sentence is not good. It slows you down. It can be overcome.

Word-by-word Reading. You have this inefficient habit if you read each word individually. If you are a word-by-word reader, you fix or briefly stop your eyes on each word instead of on groups of words. You can keep this bad habit going by pointing at each word with a finger or a pencil. Word-by-word reading drastically slows you down.

One Speed, Lack of Flexibility. You are not flexible if you read everything at the same speed. If tour one speed is slow, you may read your morning newspaper just as slowly as you read your philosophy or chemistry textbook. On the other hand, your inflexibility may be in reading everything very rapidly and lightly. You may try to read your chemistry textbook as rapidly as you read a picture magazine. To develop flexibility, you need to learn to use different reading speed skills with different materials. This flexibility can be learned.

If you have one or more of these inefficient habits, your reading skills may need to be improved upon in order to handle the demands of college work. All of these habits can be broken without too much difficulty and with almost immediate improvement on your reading speed and skills.

How You Can Break Those Inefficient Reading Habits

How you can stop Verbalizing. You can prevent yourself from verbalizing by putting a pencil or a plastic straw or some other object between your teeth while you are reading. Some students have found that chewing gum prevents them from verbalizing. Others have found that by loosely relaxing their jaws and reading with their moths slightly open, they have been able to eventually drop the habit. As your reading speed increases, the verbalizing habit will disappear.

How you can stop Regressing. All you need to rid yourself of this backtracking habit is a 4” x 6” plain white card. Hold the card just above the line you are reading. After you have read that line, move the card down over that line. This prevents you from regressing because the material you have read is covered by the card. Do not move the card back up and look at that line again. Continue to move the card down the page at an even pace, covering each new line of material that you have just read. It may take a little practice before you get accustomed to not rereading part of a sentence you have just read, but the practice will pay off in faster and more efficient reading. Remember, using the white card will keep you from regressing and will give your reading an even rhythm with gradually increasing speed. A week or so of practice on the smooth moving covering card pattern before you go on to break the next habit.

How you can Avoid One Speed Inflexibility. Generally, on the main events and overall pattern of the reading material, bring all of your speed skills to bear to cover the material very rapidly. However, for other kinds of material, you will have to shift speeds. If you have only one speed and it’s fast and light, you will need to learn to slow down for concentrated new ideas in complex reading materials. Flexibility means being able to shift gears and change reading speeds. You are showing signs of flexibility when you can do a fast reading overview of a chapter and then settle down to a much slower reading of the more complex parts of the same chapter.

The Four Reading Activities and Their Related Speeds: Flexibility in Action

Getting an Overview. Rapidly read the headings and subheadings of the chapter on which you are concentrating. By doing this you can see what the major ideas are in that chapter and get an overview of where you are going. First get a quick of the entire chapter. Then go back to the first page of the chapter and begin reading at your normal rate.

Recitation. As you begin reading do so with the set “I am going to ask myself what I have just read as soon as I finish this page”. This will keep you mentally on your toes and in tune with the meaning of what you are reading. After you have read the first page, cover the page with your hand and look away from your textbook asking yourself “What have I just read?” Then verbally either to yourself or softly out loud recite the answer to your question, hitting the high points of that page. Then rapidly reread the main ideas of the page to see if you hit all of them in your answer. If you have missed several points, reread and recite again until you know all of the main ideas. This process of answering the question “What have I just read?” is called recitation. Recitation is a slow but necessary process to help you to remember what you have read. Even if you understand what you are reading and are conscientiously studying, you will forget most of what you have read in a short time unless you use recitation. Immediate brief recitation can help you to remember most of what you have just read. This is true even after two or three weeks have gone by. Use recitation whenever you read a textbook or anything else you wish to remember. Flexibility is important when using recitation. Some text materials require recitation more frequently than others. For example, if you are reading concentrated material like psychology, with each paragraph containing a definition of a new term, you may have to recite after each short paragraph. With other less concentrated material, reciting after every page or every couple of pages may be sufficient. A general rule is: the tougher the material the more frequently you should recite. Recitation keeps you actively involved with what you are reading and keeps your mind from wandering. It takes a little time but it’s worth it.

Underlining. The first thing that you should do immediately after recitation is to quickly reread the page you have just recited and underline the key words on that page. This rapid rereading and underlining will be a very helpful time saver later in the course when you are reviewing for a midterm or final examination. Underlining the key words is like having a good summary of the main ideas of the page. Good underlining involves making some careful judgments about which ideas are most important. If you were to underline everything you read on every page you would not have a summary of the main ideas and the underlined material would not be of much help to you later at test time. However, if you have carefully and selectively underlined the main ideas, all you have to do is reread your underlining as you review for a test on that text. In this way, underlining saves time when you need your study time the most. By underlining you are able to avoid all of that rereading. By underlining you have a readymade summary of the main points of your textbook at your fingertips when you need it.

Reviewing. You should review what you have learned after every few pages in a chapter and at the end of a chapter. Reviewing involves going over all of the underlined material of several pages in a chapter and reciting the answer to the question “What are the main ideas on this page” as you go. Continue doing this until you can accurately recall the main ideas for all pages of that chapter. Do this for all of the chapters you read. Once a week review all of your underlined pages and all of the main idea questions you raised on all of the chapters you have read. This review keeps the ideas fresh in your mind and enables you to be ready for a test any time your instructor decides to have one. Reviewing involves a flexibility in reading speed. At times you will reread underlined material rapidly, and at other times you will slow down to recite and relearn parts you have forgotten. As you become adept at integrating recitation and review into your new reading habit patterns, you will find yourself able to handle a wide variety of reading material well with much better retention.

How You can Use Small Bits Of Time to Keep Up With Your Reading Assignments

One way to get more reading time is to use even small blocks of time such as five or ten minutes to read. We waste a lot of these small interludes of time that could be better spent reading something. One reason most students don’t read when they have five minutes is that they don’t have a book handy. This can be remedied by always having a book with you. Then, if you have an unexpected five minutes, you will have something to read. Keep books in your car so that you’ll have something to read while waiting for someone in a parking lot. Have a book by your bed so that you can read for 5 to 10 minutes before you go to sleep. Have a book or assigned pamphlet on your breakfast table. It beats reading the cereal box or the menu for the 30th time. Toss a book in your laundry basket when you go to the Laundromat. You can get a lot of reading done between wash and dry. Carry an assigned paperback with you at all times. You can read a few pages while waiting in line at the bank and a few more while waiting in line at the supermarket to spend all you took out of the bank. If you get yourself in the habit of reading during any spare minute of time you will find that you will be able to handle large amounts of reading material. Those small bits of time add up to several books being read in a school year. So, get in the habit of reading during those short but valuable periods of time. It will pay off.