These days you cannot escape words. Words are everywhere. You are blitzed by words from all directions, the daily newspaper, the periodicals, the television, and the internet. And not to forget your workplace, where you have to read and comprehend multitudes of documents and letters in a compacted schedule. With time being a precious commodity, how to read fasteris probably one of the toughest challenges people face these days.

Is it really possible to read faster than you can right now? Are there any quick to learn speed reading techniques?

The answer is yes to both the above questions.

We must understand that most of us unconsciously learn to read fast whenever we are inundated with a barrage of information. While reading, we selectively try to assimilate what is important and discard what we perceive as trivia. This kind of a habit is second nature to most of us. But there are times when the demands for comprehending an onslaught of written material far exceed our own capability to do so. In such situations, techniques on how to read faster do help.

Nevertheless, more than speed reading, what is important is how to read faster with understanding. With this in view, most online tutorials and techniques focus on the following issues.

*Improving your ability to concentrate

*The reading process itself

*Methods of increasing the reading speed

*Effective skimming

*The basics of SQ3R method

*Improving recollection

What is the SQ3R method?

There is a great deal of difference between reading a novel and reading a textbook. Yet, people tend to read both in a similar fashion; begin with the first page of the chapter, and read till the end of the last page. Though this modus works well when we read novels and mysteries for amusement, it does not help when we read textbooks. Reading textbooks demand comprehension too. To achieve this, the SQ3R approach teaches readers on how to spend more time in deepening the understanding of the written material.

The acronym SQ3R stands for the following five steps.

*Survey

*Question

*Read

*Recite

*Review

This approach was developed by Francis Pleasant Robinson in his book Effective Study written in 1946. The key objective of this method is to enable readers to focus on the topic of the chapter, get an overview of the subject, and then create a framework in the mind before reading. Reading by itself will consist in asking oneself questions, and then looking for answers in the text itself, followed by mentally reciting what is read.

Once a person is trained properly in the SQ3R approach, how to read faster becomes a handy tool in quicker grasp of large textbooks. The stress here is to combine both- reading fast and retaining comprehension of the written word.

The human brain is a complex organ containing millions of cells with countless interconnections. This intricate body part has unlimited potential. You will be amazed to know that the processing capacity of the human brain far outstrips even the fastest computer on earth. We can definitely harness this latent capacity of the human brain on how to read faster and concurrently retain grasp of what we read. By making use of some of the good speed reading techniques, we will be able to scan through vital documents in a jiffy. No more jitters of landing unprepared in that all important meeting.