Step II: Phrase Reading

The basic skill of rapid reading is learning to read in phrases. This simply means taking wider "visual bites" as your eyes move across a line of type. As I explained in the Introduction, your eyes read words in a series of stops, or "fixations," jerking to the right after each stop to take in the next portion of the line.You read only when your eyes are stopped. The more words you can take in at each bite, the fewer stops will be necessary on each line and the faster you will read. By widening what is called your "span of recognition" you automatically increase your reading speed.

To test your present span of recognition try focusing your eyes on the sixth word in the next line. Although you will be consciously fixed on a single word, your span of recognition should let you read the word to the left and the word to the right — perhaps a bit more. As you practice stretching your side-vision the span of recognition will widen, and you will absorb more words with each fixation.

If you were reading a list of unrelated words you would have to read word by word. But in normal reading the words are held together by the broader meaning of phrases and sentences. Sentences are made up of units of meaning. The eyes and mind can be trained to absorb these units of meaning far more readily if you read in phrases rather than at the plodding rate of one word at a time.

Changing from reading word by word to phrase reading will not only increase your reading speed. It will also quicken your comprehension. The word-by-word reader is getting his information too slowly to occupy his mind. The slow reader can think much faster than he can read. His mind is not fully engaged by the ideas on the page because they enter too slowly. His thoughts wander. Other ideas come in. Before long, the reader is not concentrating on the meaning of what his eyes see because he is unable to keep his mind fully involved.

The phrase reader will not encounter this problem of lagging attention. He receives ideas from the printed page rapidly enough to keep his mind engaged with the matter in hand. This is because he is reading in the same way he thinks — by a close approximation of whole ideas. Instead of gradually building up a thought pattern word by word, he grasps it whole — just as it was in the author's mind. Because he is in more immediate contact with the author, comprehension is inevitably improved, and with it retention of the facts and ideas he has read. His mind has received the images clearly — and they stick.

The Three Kinds of Readers

To understand more clearly how phrase reading improves skill, let's find out what kind of reader you are now. There are three types, and it is a simple matter to test yourself.

First, the motor reader. He forms words with his lips, just as though he were reading aloud, and so he can grasp only one word at a time. You could still be a motor reader, even though your lips do not move. Give yourself this test: Put your fingers on your throat. Now go on reading. If you feel any movement in your larynx now (except from the pulse there), you are still a motor reader, grasping only one word at a time. This means that you can read silently only as fast as you can read aloud.

Second, the auditory reader: Though his lips and larynx do not move, he hears every word in his "mind's ear." You can test yourself on this, too. Open a novel, if you have one handy, though any book will do. Fix your eyes on a page but before you start reading say aloud some such nonsense phrase as "Mary had a little lamb." Repeat it several times and then start reading, still saying aloud "Mary had a little lamb" as you try to read. If you are unable to comprehend what you are reading — if the words are just a meaningless jumble — then you are definitely an auditory reader.

Even though you understood fully what you were reading in spite of the nonsense you were repeating, you could still be an auditory reader. Read the next few paragraphs in the book on which you have just tested yourself. Now stop and think back. Were you conscious that you were reading words? Did you hear them in your head? Then I am afraid you are still an auditory reader.

The auditory reader can read much faster than the motor reader, but he is still handicapped in reaching high speed, because he is held back by the necessity of "hearing" words in his head.

Third, the sight reader: With him, the eye-mind relationship I described in the Introduction is fully adjusted. His eyes photograph words which are translated by the mind instantly into ideas without the aid of either the vocal or auditory senses. Obviously he has a head start toward becoming a rapid reader as quickly as he is trained in the techniques which will make him aware of how to use his talent.

Practice in Phrase Reading

One of the quickest ways to progress from being a motor or an auditory reader to the goal of sight reading is to practice phrase reading. Here are three exercises that will drill you, and you should come back to them periodically for review.

Exercise 1: Use the eye-swing chart below. Glance briefly at each solid bar, making fast swings from line to line as you go through the motions of reading.

speed reading program

The spacing in the three lines below provides the same sort of eye-swing practice. Read with a conscious swing of the eyes; it will accustom you to your new reading technique.

This is one of the best means of training your eyes to accustom themselves to the rhythm of big visual bites as you read.

Exercise 2: Use the phrase-reading part of the Pacing Card inserted in this book to read rapidly down the columns below. Fit the cut-out upper left-hand corner of the card so the phrases appear just to the left. Now draw the card evenly down each of the columns, making just one fixation on the first and second and no more than two fixations on the third column. The purpose of the exercise is not only to give you phrase-reading practice but to quicken the time you spend on each fixation. This is another way to speed up your reading.

The bigger           In phrase reading             The sight reader understands
the bite                you get much more          what he reads far better
of a line               of the meaning                 than the motor or auditory
of type                 at a single gulp                 reader because his mind
you train              and so it is                       receives more of the sense
yourself               easier to grasp                 each time the eyes fixate
to take,                the full sense                    and is therefore able
the faster             of what you read              to translate the phrases
you read.             in less time.                      into the author's ideas.

Exercise 3: To become an efficient phrase reader you need to make yourself conscious of the units of meaning in sentences. One of the simplest ways to do this is to take your newspaper and circle these units with a pencil. Do not expect them all to be just two or three words long. Some will contain more than you are able to take in with a single fixation. What you are training yourself to do is to stretch your skill by forcing your mind to anticipate words or parts of words that lie ahead.

This is where a widened span of recognition helps. For example, in reading you come to the phrase, "words hard to understand." By the time you have seen "un-" or at most "under-" you know that "understand" will be the word from the sense of what has gone before and you skip on to the next unit. Circling phrases for a while will drill you to anticipate phrase endings and therefore increase reading speed.

When circling seems clumsy you can accomplish the same purpose by marking off/ units of meaning/ like this. / The important thing / is to practice / this kind of drill / till it becomes / second nature. /

After you have circled units of meaning or marked them off by diagonal lines, go back and read over the paragraphs several times. Stretch yourself to read as rapidly as you can, being conscious of jumping from phrase to phrase. Practice this exercise 15 minutes each day.

At first this is a conscious process, and its goal is to make you anticipate as your eyes fixate on a phrase. The ease with which you do this depends on the sort of material you have selected to read. If the subject is unfamiliar and the words difficult, your "bites" will be smaller than if you were reading, say, a mystery novel. But with practice the span of recognition gradually widens for all kinds of material. An improved reading rate comes from a combination of widened recognition and sharpened alertness, plus the skill of anticipating parts of a word or even whole words that lie ahead.

This makes as good an answer as I know to the question, "But if I learn to read twice as fast as I am reading now, doesn't it mean that I won't take in what I read?" You will take in far more, because you are drilling yourself to do just that. You cannot become a faster reader without becoming at the same time a more efficient reader. Faster reading and greater comprehension are -twin goals and twin rewards of acquiring Modern Reading skill.