Advanced Reading Issues and Solutions, Reading with PR

1. How do I go even faster, now that I can read at 500-550 words per minute?

2. I can now read very fast with PR using assistive voice, but not as fast without the voice. What do I do?

Addressing Question One first

(How do I go even faster, now that I can read at 500-550 words per minute?)

1.Make sure you are using a bluetooth keyboard with your iOS device. This will allow you to go 30% faster than using you fingers. This in turn mens you can also get practice with assistive voice at substantially faster overall speeds.
2.View the text in large format. Reading the text in small format makes it very difficult to read individual letters and words correctly. Consequently, it takes a lot more time to decipher the text correctly. Small font size also makes it difficult to differentiate the bigger words from the smaller words. Obviously, small font size requires more eye fixations per line of print. Finally, small font makes it much more difficult to see individual punctuation points and punctuation intervals, and overall sentence structure. The results of small font size are that it is much harder to use your peripheral vision and to read by text blocks, all of which slows down reading. Whenever possible use large font.
3.For the same reason, having a blank line between sentences is very helpful for increased speed. This enables you to see the beginning and end of whole thoughts, much more clearly, especially if paragraphs are long.
4.Try to see the first letter of five or six words at a time. Doing this will automatically let you get a feel of where the longer words are, and where the punctuation points are. When you try to do this, you will quickly realize that your peripheral vision will help you simultaneously with the rest of each word, without having to see all of each word clearly.
5.Ask a question on the first word in the sentence and expect to get an answer by the end of the sentence. You read much faster when you are searching for information, rather than just absorbing information.
6.Ask how the second sentence relates to the first sentence, and so on through the paragraph.
7.Read or re-read the two main introductory articles in helpmyreading.com identified in the menu bar as "High Speed" and "Grant". These two articles will serve as a major review of principles you have been exposed to. Seeing these principles expressed slightly differently in each of the two articles will probably help make these ideas more a part of your own bag of tools.
8.Make sure you pause at the end of each punctuation interval long enough to make sure you understood that idea. However, get in the habit of reading through to the punctuation point before stopping excessively, pausing briefly on the longer words.
9.When you pause at the longer words and at the punctuation intervals, be aware of the words on either side of the longer word or punctuation point. Your focus should include what is coming next, as well as what is directly in front, and what has come before. You are including vision of what comes next, as you pause to think about what you just read.
10. As you make sure you understand each punctuation interval as you come to it, use this time to also see what relationship it will have to the next punctuation interval by considering the first word in the next punctuation interval. If you are at the end of a sentence, this next word may be the first word of the next sentence. Try to see the first word of each sentence, and the first word of each new punctuation interval in the sentence, as a question word, to connect what is about to be read with what you know so far. This will make you an active reader looking for answers. Doing this will greatly increase your reading speed.
11.Mute the sound, and start clicking the forward arrow at a faster rate than at the maximum sound speed. You can easily click text this way up to two thousand words per minute, and text will automatically chunk onto the page without you having to use your fingers.
12.Be sure to adjust the screen brightness for the changing light of the day. Otherwise, the faster you read, the more certain you are to fall asleep. Screen brightness needs to be turned way down when indoor lighting is used, or when the rest of the room is dark. Falling asleep interferes with good speed.

To Read Text Very Fast Without Voice Assistance

This is another approach

To read 500 to 1,000 words per minute, do not use voice assistance, as you are currently reading as fast or faster than the voice can go. Be sure to have the text formatted in large font as described earlier. The font size should be 30 or 36. Step back a little from the screen. This will allow your macular vision to see most of the width of the page with just one fixation. Now move the text screen by screen by pressing the page down key. You will be able to go much faster. With practice you can easily get to 1,000 words per minute. You can do this on Pages on the Mac or iOS, or on Ultra Hal or Word on the PC.

Answering Question Two

(I can now read very fast with PR using assistive voice, but not as fast without the voice. What do I do?)

1.Make sure you have incorporated all suggestions of the answer to question one above. Be sure to apply these ideas.
2.Make sure the text you want to read without voice is formatted as stated above. Select and copy article text into a new document and format it properly. It is very easy to do many articles or chapters of a book at once with this approach. Separate articles by a marker that you can easily search for. This marker should be by itself on its own line. A good marker might be **ZZ. Then you can easily jump between articles, or separate them out to different files.
3.Make sure you have the idea and feel of pausing briefly on the longer words and at the punctuation points to make sure you have the concept, but simultaneously tie the future text into what you are currently thinking about, and do this in the pause time.
4.Make sure you are doing active reading, not passive reading. Active reading allows you to go much faster.
5.Make sure you are feeling and experiencing the rhythm of text as you read. You should be experiencing text read as blocks, with related cadence and rhythm within each block and between blocks. This is most important.
6.Turn on VoiceOver and mute the sound and set the sound to run automatically at a particular speed. Try to read each highlighted section of text in turn, before the highlighting moves to the next section.
7.Start slowly, and move up in speed. You will be amazed at how fast you will soon be able to go.
8.Finally, turn go back to manual advance, by pressing the forward arrow key, and move up in speed as fast as you are able. You can easily move text this way up to 1,000 words per minute.

Thought to Ponder

Many people increase their speed 100-300% using PR and are able to transfer these speeds to reading regular texts and books with improved comprehension. If they want to go even faster than this and they find that they can only do so using PR with assisted voice, there is nothing wrong with using this approach to do so.