I recently had to plow through 68 pages of mind-numbing journal articles in less than an hour.
This might sound like plenty of time to you, but trust me – it wasn’t. These articles were boring. I mean really boring. Almost as bad as being forced to listen to Kenny G.
Anyway, I had read some books on speed reading a while back, and one of the methods used to train your eyes to read faster was through quickly scanning text with short sentences.
The idea is that you’ll read faster if your eyes don’t have to move much across the page.
I thought I’d try this theory out on my journal articles and it worked like a charm.
Here’s how I did it:
- I simply copied all the text from the journal article and pasted it into a Microsoft Word document.
- I then customized the margins of my word document so that I had 2.5” margins on both the right and left side.
- I then changed my font to a large, comfortable type (i.e. Calibri font/size 14) so that I only saw about 7 words per line.
After I had done this, I found that I was able to quickly read through the text much faster than before. And for some reason, this made my reading much more palatable.
Another benefit of pasting the text onto a Microsoft Word document is that it allows you to easily make summaries of each article. I deleted all the paragraphs that weren’t important–and I highlighted the areas that I wanted to review later.
I’m sure there are better ways of speed reading through journal articles, but this hack allowed me to quickly get through my reading — and also remember it.
No comments:
Post a Comment