When and How to Speed Read

Do you speed read? If so, when? Keep reading to see my take on speed reading. And don’t forget to check out today’s writing prompt at the bottom of the post.

When to Speed Read

I speed read, or read at a much faster pace than I usually do, when a book is becoming repetitive and I start losing interest in it. And believe it or not, this tends to happen a lot more with nonfiction books than fiction books, at least in my experience. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a nonfiction book that simply repeats the same information in later chapters, especially dense books on science, as well as certain memoirs. However, I have also read pieces of fiction in which the characters don’t really do anything or learn anything new, or in which nothing much happens in the plot, for multiple chapters at a time. 

So, basically, I will speed read when a book is starting to bore me, and usually redundancy is the best way to do that. I will also speed read a book that has information or material in it that is unnecessarily dense for a book that is supposed to be for a general audience and not specialists within a given field. I don’t want to read a school textbook in my free time, in other words, unless I intentionally decide to do so ahead of time.  

Why I speed read is worth mentioning, too. Most of the time I speed read certain books to avoid reading ruts. Read these posts for more on that: Why and How I Finish Every Book I Start , How I Avoid Reading Ruts , Read at Your Own Pace . 

How to Speed Read

I typically always read the first 100 pages or so of a book, at my typical reading pace, before I decide whether to speed read the rest of it or not. I do this because sometimes books, especially pieces of contemporary or historical fiction, have slow burns or don’t pick up their pace until about one-third of the way through. And that isn’t always a bad thing and doesn’t always affect the overall enjoyment or understanding of the book. 

Sometimes, however, it is possible to speed read a nonfiction book from its first few pages, if the book has an organized table of contents to view and you are already intimately familiar with the subject matter of the book. Many nonfiction books will share general information that you might already know in their first few chapters, which is great and expected for a general audience. But if you already know that general information, you might want to skip it so you don’t get bored, unless the author mentions in an introduction or prologue that they will write about a new spin on that well-known information, which is why I always make it a point to read introductions and prologues. 

Once I decide to speed read a book, I will typically read the entire first and last paragraphs of a chapter or section first, to get the gist of what it is about. Then I will read each full sentence of every medium to large-sized paragraph in the chapter or section, but will only hone in on the interesting and unusual verbs or nouns or phrases in the other sentences to fill in the gaps. Focusing on italicized words or keywords is usually a good idea, too. It’s also a good idea to flip through a book and its chapters to get a feel for its content and format before you officially start speed reading it, as that will make skimming chapters a lot easier. 

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What do you think about this topic? Do you have any tips to share for speed reading? Leave a comment to join this dialogue and share this post with others so they can join the dialogue too. 

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