Speed reading is the ability to not only read text far quicker than you would normally but to be able to absorb the information as well. It's no good zooming down a page of text and then not being able to recall any of the information.

Speed reading is something that can be of great assistance to you in almost any working environment and particularly one where you have to take in a great deal of information daily - to the point where you feel your head might explode!

One of the most overlooked points about speed reading is that you must first know what you want to get out of the book you're trying to read. Do you need to know all of the info in in-depth detail or do you just need to get a gist of what it's about? In which case you can just skim over the outline of the book and that will suffice.

In other words, know what you want to achieve with your reading before you actually do it. This is a seemingly obvious thing to say but one which, nevertheless, is often overlooked and misunderstood. The key is to be able to skim extremely detailed documents but still pick up the required information – that is what speed reading enables you to do.

Think about how you read right now. As a child you merely went from letter to letter as you got older it was word to word. Now, you probably read in sections or groups of words at a time. You may find that you'll read one block of words, go onto another and then skip back to the previous block of words because you failed to understand or just didn't take in what you just read. This is a common problem with adults and their reading. Speed reading on the other hand aims to eliminate these issues and make reading a breeze whilst still absorbing the required info.

In short, a good speed reading course will allow you to read more words in each section, it should reduce the amount of time you spend reading each individual section and it should eliminate the number of times you return to each previously read section.

A great tip to reduce the amount of time you spend going back over words you've already read is to use a pointer, say a pencil or a pen, to guide your eye as you read the text. As you get better, increase the speed with which you move your pointer across the text, you'll find this quickly improves the speed of your reading.

Author's Bio: 

Matthew runs a free newsletter on how to speed read at http://www.speedreadingatoz.com