The average reading speed of most people is around three hundred words a minute, and this is barely enough in today's competitive society, when a person has to absorb an enormous amount of information in order to achieve success.
Speed reading can be extremely helpful in studies, at work, and even for one's own pleasure. It is highly unlikely that you'd be able to increase your reading speed up to three thousand words a minute as many salesmen claim, but it's quite possible to double or even triple your reading speed.
And, of course, it is absolutely necessary to have normal reading skills to begin with: there is absolutely no point in trying to read faster if you have a poor vocabulary or experience difficulties comprehending longer words. Before increasing the speed of your reading, try to dedicate at least twenty minutes a day to normal reading, build up your vocabulary and gain a habit of reading.
To improve your reading speed, try to scan a small group of words at a time. You can just concentrate on the meaningful words in a sentence or even a paragraph and ignore the prepositions, conjunctions, and articles as they do not have any lexical meaning and are mostly used for grammatical purposes.
If you look through the main concepts of several speed reading programs, you'll notice that in spite of various original speed reading methods and radical techniques all of them have at least one common point, and that is advice on how to get rid of subvocalization.
If you are serious in your intentions to improve your reading speed, it is more than advice for you – it's an imperative. Moving your lips when reading will reduce your speed immensely: you'll be able to read only as fast as you can speak, though your mind is capable of handling much higher rates.
And there's nothing wrong in running your finger along the line while reading: it will help to avoid jumping from one line to another, and therefore rereading the same passage a few times. Besides, to a certain extent it will help to relax your mind, and you can put even more concentration into comprehending the text.
Another way to avoid rereading is to use a ruler, index card, or a piece of paper, covering the page above the line you read. Simply move this object down the page, disabling the option of coming back to the text you've already left behind.
These simple exercises might be sufficient for your purpose to increase your reading speed, or perhaps they will help you to warm-up before taking a special course or using a speed read software. In any case, make sure that improving your reading speed is not only useful, but also enjoyable for you.
If you find it difficult to spend a few hours speed reading a great book in your leisure time, relax and enjoy your reading experience. It is always possible to come back to higher speeds when you read newsletters, Internet articles, technical manuals, and all sorts of documents at the office.