Slow Reader

A college student recently contacted me seeking my advice on slow reading.  How privileged I felt – and still feel!  For one thing, I was able to rise to the challenge yet again.  And for another, I have the perfect reason to share it here – and thus hopefully help god knows how many frustrated folks who have a similar story to hers.

Here’s her story:

I’m a first year college student and I often struggle with how slowly I read. I started reading when I was 4 and always loved it. Books were my best friends and I intended on writing one myself one day. I started to become aware and more directly affected by the speed that I read when I was in 4th grade. We would have reading groups where we would read a book together and discuss it along the way. I read so slow that I was put in my own group … by myself.   My teachers thought I just wasn’t quite smart enough. Finally, they decided to actually give me some reading tests. Turns out I read really slowly, but I comprehended everything I read.  Once they figured this out, they realized that I wasn’t stupid at all, and put me in a focus group for advanced students.  Going through middle school, I started figuring out how my brain processed stuff.  You see, I do really well with memorizing things because I can picture them in my mind. Colors and shapes come to mind for every word, date, or number I confront.  Then when I go to recall that thing I had to memorize, it’s a color sequence, not an actual word.  This, I realized, was the cause for my slow reading.  I had to read every word and turn it into a color/shape.  Well, now I’m in college, and my professors have little sympathy for slow reading.  I struggle a lot because the only way I can memorize things is by sitting there, picturing it, converting it, and processing the information, but by the time I do that, I’m way behind.   I want to know if there’s something that’s actually wrong with me, or if it’s just how I learn best. Is there anything I can do to “convert” things faster, or some way I can make the synapses more efficient?

And here’s how I advised her:

Well, you were incredibly lucky to have had teachers in your primary school who spotted your smartness and put you into that focus group!  Not many folks are that lucky – which, as you can imagine, has devastating effects on their adulthoods!  So, great for you!:)

What can you do to convert things faster?  First, you’re VERY visual, so you can – and, in fact, must! – use your visualisation to see words as pictures of what they are = words instead of as colors or shapes [which will, no wonder, slow you down!].  Start with seeing shapes as you would normally do.  This is familiar and you’re good at it, right?  OK.  So you can now start teaching yourself to see the shapes of words = what they look like when written down.  To do this you must observe a lot and carefully.  You must observe what letters  and then words look like when written down.  You can start with simple, 3-letter words like cat, dog, fox, bed, pen, etc.  Write each word on a separate A4 blank paper, put the paper in front of your face at or slightly above your eye level, and look at the written word for 15 seconds.  Then close your eyes.  Can you see the word?  Or has it faded quickly?  Or can you see something else?  And if you ARE able to see the word, how do you see it?  Are the letters big enough to see them comfortably but not so big that you can’t see the whole word?  Are they on a background of a contrasting color?  Are they in upper case or lower case?  And if you tried seeing the letters in the other case, would that be less or more comfortable?  Experiment with this.  You never know what you may find.  Can you spell the word forwards… and even backwards?  If you can, then you definitely see the word, which is important!

Is there something actually wrong with you? Yes!  You have developed the wrong HABIT of visualising for seeing words.  For seeing words you need to see words.  Seeing shapes or colors is the wrong tool for this job.  This is the only thing that’s wrong with you.  Absolutely nothing else.  And the good news is that it’s not that bad!  After all, you CAN change your habits of thinking!  You CAN change the ways your brain works.  It’s all in being present in the moment and being really conscientious in working with yourself.  Once you start seeing words as what they look like when written down instead of as colors or shapes, your reading speed will improve rapidly!  Fast readers recognize written words as blocks, as opposed to letter by letter, at the back of their brain.  Slow readers read slowly, because if they can see letters at all, they look at them in isolation, i.e. letter by letter.  You need to see whole words and once you get good at this with some practice, your brain will automatically send them to the back of the brain.

You mention that you have a fantastic memory, right?  So this is another superb asset you have that you can use here: PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY!   It’s the best type of memory one can have – especially for seeing words!  So when you write a word on a blank A4 paper, take it up to your eye level, and look at it, take a picture of that word with your imagination.  The idea is to teach yourself to see the word as if it was a photo in your head.  When you see the word as a photo, you see it as a block which I mentioned above.

It’ll come – with practice.  Now bear in mind that all these exercises I’m giving you here are to be done only initially, until seeing words as blocks becomes automatic for you.  Once it does, you’ll be reading so fast anyway that you won’t have time for all this.  This is literally to get you started on the right track – to teach the brain a new way of thinking.  So start slowly and practise til you get fast and automatic.

And remember these few tips too:

• always hold any book or paper you’re reading in front of your face and at or slightly above your eye level.  That’s where your visual field is.  Never hold your reading material in your lap so that you have to be looking down to read it!  Never!  Because there you’d be in your feelings which, again, is the wrong tool for the job as visual as is reading!
• Whenever you read, do your best to sit with your both feet firmly on the floor.  This will provide you grounding – and extra sense of safety and security.
• When reading, do your best not to subvocalize, i.e. not to pronounce the words in your head.  This would also slow you down.  If you don’t do it, great.  But if you do, teach yourself – again, gradually – not to do it.