The process of education begins with reading and it is an important part of the journey from the beginning to the end. At the level of creating a doctoral thesis, there is an ever increasing number in the availability of manuscripts that are published year. Scholars have a lot of reading to do and less time for the same. Looking at the picture from a broader vision there can be two ways to deal with it. One is to have the skill to be able to select what you have to read and the second is to enhance your reading speed. Let us look at some basic tips that will help you to improve your reading speed and once you area able to do that, you have enough time to devote to other important aspects of research such as writing, mentoring, analysis or teaching.

The way we read is the most important thing to understand and improvise if you wish to increase your reading speed. Most of you must have come across this or similar example in some or the other workshop/book or now social media, the way it makes messages go viral:

I cnduo’t bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae.

You could read it easily, right? It means that instead of processing every letter and then combining them to create a word, your eyes have the ability to lock several letters at the same time, mostly the ones that are two characters apart. After this your brain takes up the task to fuse them up together to form a word that fills up the blanks. You will be able to find more detailed and scientific interpretation of this on the internet but to know the basics, we do not read in a straight line, rather we read in sequence of jumps which ends with a snapshot of the text that is within your focus. Because the brain is naturally skilled to process in blocks and the eyes similarly jump and fix on letters, it is easy to increase the reading speed with regular practice. To your surprise the largest obstacles that occur in picking up the pace of reading are the common reading habits. What are these obstacles we will bring up in our next blog!