Read Faster by Talking Less

Reduce the Talking in Your Head While You Read

Many people learn how to read by sounding out words and hearing them in their head. This works well for learning words but not for reading faster. Once you have a solid sight vocabulary, you do not need to read every word.

Pure subvocalization, also know as mental whispering or hearing all the words in your head as you read, slows down your reading speed. An average untrained reader has an average reading speed of 250 words per minute; however, mental whisperers average only 100 to 150 words per minute. We CANNOT GET RID OF this talking but we CAN REDUCE it.

While subvocalization is useful when reading things like poetry or plays or while studying or memorizing, it slows you down with your other reading.

Try these 10 ways to REDUCE the talking in your head:

  1. Catch yourself doing it!
  2. Read faster (you can't talk as much this way)
  3. Put your index fingers to your lips
  4. Read key words (3 letters or longer)
  5. Mumble or Hum
  6. Use your hand or card to speed you up
  7. Put toothpaste (or other strange flavor) on your lips
  8. Gently bite your tongue
  9. Chew gum
  10. Press your tongue to the roof of your mouth

It is important to try each method for a reasonable period of time in order to evaluate their effectiveness at reducing your talking.

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This tip may be reprinted when the following byline is included:

Abby Marks Beale is founder of The Corporate Educator, a professional speaking and training company specializing in helping with busy people work smarter, faster and just plain better. Go to www.TheCorporateEducator.com.

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Rev It Up Reading is a subsidiary of The Corporate Educator. Since 1988, we have been teaching faster, more effective reading to busy professionals, educators and students in a wide variety of corporations, associations and schools. We offer speaking services, on-site and online training programs, teleclasses, books and audio recordings about how to manage any reading workload and how to read better and faster. ALL of our training is practical and immediately useful to your life and work.