How to Use Your Hands to Read Faster?

Using your hands and fingers when training to read faster is a great way to improve your learning experience; it can also help you assimilate all the necessary basics techniques and methods much easier. I have no clue why, but many people consider that using your hands in order to read faster is lame. Honestly, I can’t figure out where this thought came from. However, one reason might be school. Kids are usually told to stop using their fingers for following the line and whenever they need to keep track of something, to make a small note or underline a certain word. While this can really help, it won’t when trying to speed read. Nevertheless, we are in the 21st century right now and you shouldn’t be afraid to use your fingers when following what you read. In fact, scientists proved this to be a great method of improving your reading skills and speed reading at once. I remember that people were told to get rid of their hands when going through some kind of written piece of information approximately 20 years ago. Nowadays, when you decide to follow a speed reading program, you will be told exactly the opposite.

One of the biggest problems when it comes to learning how to read faster using your hands is the fact that some of the people who actually want to do it are afraid that instead of helping them, their fingers will decrease the speed at which they read. This is a totally wrong belief that unfortunately got very strong into the minds of some people and is extremely hard to control. This is not true. Sometimes you can even meet people that will tell you that the use of your hands or fingers when reading shows that you are not only unable to read, but you also lack elementary education. Isn’t this stupid? I guess it is. When it comes to poor reading skills, these have absolutely nothing to do with using your hands. It is exactly the vice versa. Your fingers can help your eyes better focus on the line that you are reading, thus increasing the real speed at which it can be processed by three or four times. So if you are serious about learning to read faster and understanding the real comprehension of speed reading you need to figure out more about the situation when using your hands is necessary and does not affect negatively.

Several interesting methods of using your fingertips as pacing tools for fast reading exist. The basics of these techniques have been established starting with the 50s of the 20th century. A scientist by the name of Evelyn Wood intensively worked on this and proved people from all over the world that your hands play a very important role in the reading process and that the main benefit is the help that these provide for your eyes. In fact, it’s your eyes that often get confused because of the unnecessary words and lines that you read. So when trying to learn how to read faster you are simply doing them a favor by excluding all the unnecessary words which form blocks of meaningless information (words like so, the, for, meanwhile, of course, etc). Even if without these words it would be absolutely impossible to write, to form a sentence and to give to that something you would like to communicate a logical meaning, when speed reading you have to learn to fly over in most of the cases if you want to save precious time and to be able to improve your comprehension of the main message. It is not that hard.

Nevertheless, more and more of you would like to know why using your hands can help you read faster and how to actually use these techniques? I would like to say that there is nothing complicated in using your fingers when following what you read. It works very simple. By using your fingertips you help your eyes better focus on the main idea of the text and so the brain has no problem understanding and processing the information that you are offering from your read. Your hands play a very simple yet important role and that is the role of tracking what you read. Nothing more! However, the basic fact that it can dramatically help you improve the concentration is extremely valuable and when properly used it can even contribute to your focusing training. This is how you can use your hands and fingers to read faster or at least to help you do this. No matter if you believe it or not, the usage of your own hands during the process of speed reading is going to faster your reading speed and help a better comprehension of the message, the essence or the main idea of the text, book, report , etc you are reading.

Remember that when using the fingers to point certain words you are more likely to remember their real significance in the context. There is a very interesting rule that you are going to be required to apply when speed reading and that is never to move your eye movement backwards. This means that you are required to read that word, line or phrase only once. This is going to help you develop a very interesting skill which will allow your level of concentration to assimilate the important facts from any text without being disordered and always coming back. It would be and act as a rule. If you haven’t been able to get the main idea from the very first attempt, there is no turning back. With something like this in your mind you are always going to have success in understanding things better and not relying on useless repetitions. Developing this kind of reading habit is a great way to get involved into fast reading and will help a lot if you continue to practice it at least one time per day for the next several months.

By using your hands and fingers you can stop eye following the same word again. Once it was pointed, there is no turning back. This way you can easily contribute to a steady reading that will not only help you read faster but will contribute to a better comprehension based on a more eager concentration level. If you manage to improve focusing when using your fingertips you will basically get rid of the biggest mistake that most poor readers are doing and that is letting their thoughts run away from the main idea of the text. These people usually forget everything by the time they finish to read the phrase. You need to think about this and gradually improve your own reading abilities.

I believe that using your hands should be done in order to get rid of the backward eye movements. This is one of the most important tips to read faster that you’ll be able to find anywhere. Besides this, remember that there is absolutely nothing wrong with reading with your hands. Who cares if this looks a little bit weird to strangers and by passers? I don’t…. LOL