The Real Way to Improve Your Reading Speed | Scott H Young

Many people tend to feel embarrassed about not being able to read fast enough or are made fun of when they read slow. But the fact that reading is not a natural human ability needs to be kept in mind.

Reading is a skill that we acquire through years of development with the coordination of cognitive strategies such as image recognition and linguistic pairing since reading is not a skill that is hardwired into our brains.

Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist, deconstructed the process of reading and the constraints we face when doing so such as:

1. Not knowing much about the topic (therefore not fully comprehending what the individual is reading);
2. Not knowing the words (therefore being unable to construct ideas due to illiteracy);
3. And not knowing how to pronounce the words or how to sound them out, however, phonetic knowledge is much less of an issue with advanced readers.