The Way to Get a Better Read on Homework Starts With Fixations

There’s a foolproof way to cut down on the time you spend on homework: Increase your reading speed.

How fast you read greatly affects your school workload. And by learning a few good techniques and discarding some bad habits, it’s fairly easy to increase your reading speed and your comprehension.

Reading speed is determined by how quickly your eyes move across a line of print in quick stops and starts called fixations. In a single fixation, a typical reader can see two or three words a once, which are read and interpreted by the brain.

The more quickly you can recognize a word, the shorter your fixation and the faster your reading speed.

Sounding out words letter by letter is essential when a child is learning to read. Perhaps at some point the curriculum should contain a unit teaching older students how to stop doing so, because letter-by-letter reading seriously hinders speed.

Recognizing a word as a whole unit is much faster. This is called sight reading and it is fairly easy to learn once you are very familiar with specific words.

I doubt, for example, that you sound out the word stop each time you see a stop sign, or the each time you see it in print. You read the word as a whole unit because it is so familiar.

The larger your sight vocabulary, the faster your reading speed. You can improve it by practicing, just as you would practice an athletic or artistic skill.

One common method takes about half an hour a day for three or four weeks.

First, time yourself as you read a fairly brief work--a news article or a short story--as fast as you can while maintaining decent comprehension.

Figure out your reading speed in words per minute by multiplying the lines by the typical number of words per line. Record the score in a notebook or on a calendar.

Repeat this process with a short reading every day. You should see a significant improvement in a few weeks. Remember that your score will drop occasionally because the selections will vary in difficulty.

Learning new words will help you read faster too. There are good vocabulary books available in bookstores, and several forms of computer software for this purpose.

Make sure your book or computer program includes a substantial section about Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes that are part of so many English words. Knowing these can often help you decipher unfamiliar words without a dictionary.

Be alert for some bad reading habits that can slow you down.

The most harmful is mouthing the words as you read. You can speak only about one-third as fast as you can read.

Avoid guiding with your finger. It, too, cannot move as fast as your eyes.

With practice, you can spend less time reading what you have to read, and more time reading what you want to read.

Mary Laine Yarber teaches English and journalism at an area high school.