How to read 100 pages a day?
I have spoken to many people who confessed that they couldn’t read a chapter let alone an entire book.
Guess their surprise when I reveal that I read 100 pages a day and find time to write my blog posts, plan my book, and long walks.
I have gone deeper in my quest to know why for some reading comes as natural and for others, the same appears as an arduous task. The answer, as expected, lies in our upbringing. Mostly, our educational upbringing.
In schools, we were taught to pronounce the words, memorize their spellings, and read a bunch of words together to form a sentence. That’s how we learned reading.
As a kid, I was among the ones who could read the fastest. The teacher often gave a pat on my back. I felt proud. I didn’t deserve that pat nor I should have been proud.
To this day, we continue to read in the same fashion where we pronounce the word as fast as possible then we move on to the next word. Our brains are wired to remember most of the pronunciation.
It is so natural for us that our brains are also wired to predict any word from its starting few alphabets. This allows us to read every word as quickly as possible. By doing this, we suffer in the comprehension.
Imagine reading a long essay and feeling bored. We have all been there. We looked at novels with the same disdain — a bunch of papers containing long prose/essays bound together to form a book.
Because we read in only one fashion, we feel overwhelmed at the sight of any long-form content.
Now couple this with Social Network’s rise and with that the advent of short-form content. We suffered a lack of comprehension from school, and now we suffer a lack of attention span as well.
This is an intellectual disaster.
So, what is the right method to read, you may ask?
Every sentence that you read in a book has been written with a purpose. Why else would the sentence length vary?
The English language has many prepositions, conjunctions, and punctuations that add layer and tonality to these sentences.
Punctuations tell us more about the sentence, a short sentence is marked with a full stop, a conversational sentence will be marked with inverted commas and exclamation marks, and a continuing sentence will have commas in it.
My dear readers, we have to make use of these grammatical nuances. The grammar of any language exists solely to improve the readability of the language. Why else do we follow it if the reader refuses to care about it?
That’s why we see all the languages being murdered on Social Media because neither the writer of the post nor the reader of it cares about readability.
When you read a sentence, read it till punctuation like a comma. Take a small breath here then continue to read till the full stop. Here you take a long breath. Semi-colon deserves a change in tone and a small breathing pause. There are no strict rules except we need to take an appropriate pause.
Conjunctions are a bridge in English Grammar that connects two sentences by adding more to the other sentence. Try to read it by keeping this truth in mind.
Lastly, the final advice would triumph over all advice. Add voice to your reading. Read as if you are an orator and you are reading to an audience in an auditorium. This would help you realize the importance of pauses. When you hear the sound of your reading you will discover a way of improving it too.
Go to YouTube and type ‘free audiobook’, you will find many audiobook recordings, I insist that you listen to them and focus on how the narrator is reading the book. Focus on the pauses, and how he emphasizes places where the writer used italic font. Even without the written text in front of you, as a reader, you will feel the emphasis in the narrator’s voice.
Italics are for emphasis in case you were unaware.
When you add your own voice in your head to the material you are reading, you will understand these emphases better and you will improve your comprehension too. Improved comprehension will lead to better recollection later on.
Practice these while reading any fiction. Just read 10 pages, to begin with, but savor those pages by reading them in the manner I described above.
Follow this and I guarantee that you will fall in love with books again. Once you fall in love you will find that there is a beautiful world waiting for you.
Happy Reading!