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The art of speed reading is a technique each speed reader tries to acquire over time. Speed reading is guided by two main components, speed and comprehension. Once you have comprehension, reading any material in any field becomes less a problem in terms of speed and understanding. However, for the starter, to acquire this art, he will need to employ techniques and strategies to accomplish expertise in speed reading.

To be a good speed reader, you need to implement some strategies. And these strategies need practice upon practice to make them work very well. When you are starting out, do not set unachievable goals such as trying to read and complete a big volume book in a single day. Instead of helping you to achieve speed reading, it will only frustrate your efforts. I would recommend say reading a chapter each and every day to make it interesting for you.

In reading, the focus should be on understanding the contents of a material in a limited time. Therefore, when you are previewing a material you are about to read, your concern should be to familiarise yourself with the topic and possibly scan for main points. When you come across unfamiliar words, brisk over it and try to derive meaning from context, if this fails you may consult a thesaurus later on to clear your mind on the meaning.

As a starter, the initial steps should be to test your reading and comprehension speed presently and time yourself with a stop watch. Do this repeatedly and see if you are able to read faster. If you see improvements, it will help you to want to do more in reading. However, if you do not see any noticeable improvements, then do not worry yourself, because you may need more time and practice to jump from your present rate to a speed readers rate. Just know that this will take you some time and practice to achieve. Now let us be more practical. If you want to start reading, get yourself a progress chart, a stop watch, a pen and a reading material. And follow the steps below:

Get your chart ready by first arranging your reading rate as below:

Progress chart: Words per second/minute / Comprehension
Reading material 1.

As you read a whole article, try timing yourself with the stop watch, record the total time. Count the words of the article and divide by the time it took you, in seconds. Record your comprehension level. Practice more with same article. Now record your time. You will notice that as you continue your word per second increases. Now, take another article of about the same length and read, repeat the exercise again.

You may want to go further by getting all the material you are familiar with and set goals as the time span you would want to complete a particular book. When you set goals, make sure you achieve them. Let's examine the short sample below:

Two prominent people in science Dr. Ulene and his wife discovered vital information about vitamins, this information include administration, uses, and required amount of vitamins in the body for proper body metabolism.

A good speed reader's comprehension goes this way: The Ulene's find out important information about vitamins.

There are still some little additional details that the speed reader would not want to bother himself with, therefore, he picks only needed details to him.