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With more efficient reading mechanics, you can focus more on the information that is being transmitted through those little dark markings on a page we call words.
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Then, you leave more mental energy for the comprehension and retention of what you're reading. The mechanical parts of reading can be made to feel almost effortless. When you have efficient reading mechanics, you can parse through text faster. The skill of reading is a complex process, but there are "mechnical" parts of the reading process that can be improved and "tuned" like a machine to be more efficient. Because if you can read, you can be transported into other worlds and learn almost anything you want, whenever you want, as long as you have access to books or the Internet. I'd argue that reading is one of the most important skills in life.
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Your average reading speed can even improve with practice or the use of reading tools and techniques. But of course, like when you drive, your reading speed will fluctuate as you read different things. You can use tools like the one on this page to get a sense of what your typical reading speed is. When you read something light, about a topic you're already familiar with, you might choose to read it faster so that you can extract the information you need from it efficiently.
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For example, when you read something dense and complex, you'll probably choose to read more slowly so that you can better understand and internalize what's being described. This is the number of words read in a minute, similar to how "miles/kilometers per hour" is the number of miles/kilometers traveled in an hour.īut, similar to how you drive a car, different situations call for different speeds. Reading speed is often measured in "words per minute", or WPM. But the idea of a "reading speed" isn't as straightforward as you might think.
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