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How To Read Books Quickly, And Retain Information More Effectively

June 2nd 2022

For many, many years, students have tried to “hack” the brain into remembering information quicker. After all, the more information that can be recalled for exams and projects, the better. 

For many, this starts with the ability to read faster. But pace reading doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to recall information any better than reading normally.

As Buffer highlights in their blog, how to read more and remember it all, speed isn’t everything, “comprehension still matters, and some reports say that speed reading or skimming leads to forgotten details and poor retention”. 

Understanding how and why we read the way we do goes a long way to understanding the power of speed reading and comprehending large amounts of information in a short amount of time. This is obviously a great skill to have if you are a student!

So while reading quickly is certainly a learned skill, it’s one of many skills you need to deploy to fully understand a text and the salient points within it…even if you don’t like the text!

Understanding the engineering of reading

There are 8 skills required to read and understand information, data, words and sounds effectively. This is the basis of effective reading and the foundation of your ability to apply speed reading strategies to quickly learn information. 

Those 8 skills are:

• Decoding: The ability to sound out words you have heard before but haven’t seen written out.
• Phonics: the ability to recognise the connection between sounds and letters they make.
• Vocabulary: this reading skill is necessary to understand the meaning of words, their definitions, and their context.
• Fluency: The ability to read aloud with understanding, accuracy, and speed.
• Sentence Construction and Cohesion: connecting ideas between and within the sentences is called cohesion, and these skills are essential for reading comprehension.
• Reading Comprehension: understand the meaning of the text – both in storybooks and information books.
• Reasoning and Background Knowledge: the ability to use background knowledge to make inferences and draw conclusions.
• Working Memory and Attention: the ability to absorb and retain information through reading.

The 4 types of reading

If you didn’t know, there are 4 types of reading, each one of which makes a huge difference to how you remember information, recall information and analyse and understand information. 

• Skimming: This is where a text is skimmed over to find the most relevant or pertinent points, such as a name in a directory or a place name on a map. It’s also used for readers to grasp the main idea of the text without contextual detail.
• Scanning: This is where a whole sentence is read to find a single piece of information. Again, speed is paramount, but each line is read.
• Intensive Reading: This involves “close reading that aims at the accuracy of comprehension”. This means every word is read, and conclusions are derived. 
• Extensive Reading: This type of reading “lays more emphasis on fluency and less on accuracy” and is a common way to describe reading for pleasure rather than information retention. 

With the above in mind, here are some guiding Youth Hub methods to reading quickly!

The “Pointer” Method

MindTools gives a great summary of the Pointer Method. 

“In the 1950s, Utah school teacher Evelyn Nielsen Wood claimed that she could read at up to 2,700 wpm if she swept a finger along the line as she read…This became known as the Pointer method and is also sometimes called "hand pacing" or "meta guiding. Holding a card under each line and drawing it down the page as you read works just as well”.

The “Scanning” Method

Speed Reading Lounge focuses on scanning as one of the most effective ways to take in the right information from a text, breaking it down into four actions.

1. Reading Key Sentences,
2. Scan for names and numbers,
3. Scan for trigger words,
4. Skim small parts of the text for key ideas.

Don’t vocalise reading 

As LifeHack succinctly put it, “The major difference between silent reading and reading aloud is that the act of speaking requires your brain to take an extra step…Wernicke’s Area (of the brain) is responsible for comprehension.[5] If you can minimise subvocalization and reading aloud, then you can eliminate the extra step of having to read and comprehend speech”.

Find meaning

Business Insider’s piece on reading and retaining information focuses on finding a personal angle, “The thing about meaning is that it’s best conferred by giving the topic personal relevance…What do you think you’d remember better? Someone tells you a forest in China is on fire or that the field near your childhood home burst into flame?...you’re more likely to remember the flaming field in your hometown. This is so because relevance evokes emotions, and new knowledge sticks best when it’s attached to something familiar”.

So, in short, the best way to retain information is to focus on segmenting information into keywords, scanning and using the pointer method to rapidly ingest information, and finding a way to make key passages personal!