There are different types of readers, some love to read and some are forced to read. There are different styles of reading too. Everyone uses a particular style of reading in everyday situations. There is a normal reading style that a student might use to read a novel or a book. Then there is a detail reading style focusing on every word from start to finish. Some just flick the pages and only read what attracts them. When you look in a telephone directory for a particular name, you purposefully ignore all other entries and focus your attention on spotting the name you want.

These everyday reading skills can be applied in studies as well. To do that you must have a clear reading goal, selection of correct text, and then use the right reading style.

Tips for developing reading skill:

• Have a clear focus goal for you reading
• To get the whole picture of the chapter or text, review title, section headings, photos and captions.
• Skimming and scanning: using a quick survey of the text to get the main idea, identify text structure, confirm or question predictions to keep you concentrating, understanding and provide you with a record of your reading.
• Highlight or add notes where needed.
• Use a form of note taking whilst reading in detail.
• Use prior knowledge of the subject and the ideas in the text as clues to the meanings of unknown words, instead of stopping to look them up.
• Using clear reading goals and a variety of reading skills is more important than increasing your reading speed.
• To improve your reading speed, don’t increase the speed of the eye across the page, but increase the number of words the eye recognizes in a single fixation.
• Post-reading Review: After reading a text, take time to review the material you read. This will better internalize what you’ve learned and help you retain it for future references. This will also help you identify what you still do not fully comprehend, so you can spend more time reviewing unclear concepts.

Developing your reading speed:

• Don’t worry about how quickly you are reading but instead, concentrate on reading the line in only three fixations.
• As this becomes more natural, practice without drawing lines.
• Later, reduce the number of fixations to two per line.
• Once this increased word span becomes a comfortable habit, an increase in your reading speed will occur.