Boost Your Reading Comprehension (And Retain More)

3 R’s to Boosting Your Reading Comprehension

The first R stands for Read

1. You can only understand something if you’ve actually read it.
2. Schedule your reading because if you don’t schedule it, it won’t happen.
3. One of the best things you can do to improve your reading speed is to reduce subvocalization, aka the inner voice reading with in your head. Learn how to do that with Kwik Brain 012: 3 Hacks For Rapid Reading (How To Reduce Subvocalization)‍
4. To read more effectively, listen to Kwik Brain 007: How to Read Faster and Kwik Brain 004: Read 1 Book A Week (52 Books A Year)…Without Speed-Reading!.

The second R stands for Relate

1. After you read something, talk and relate about what you’re reading to someone else.
2. You need to train yourself to learn what it really means to understand something, perhaps for the first time.
3. I had a brain injury at 5 years old that caused learning challenges, and it took me an extra 3 years to learn how to read. When teachers asked me to talk about what I read, I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t understand it.
4. Talking about what you read is a powerful tool to teach yourself what it means to understand something brand-new.
5. Dedicate 3 minutes to talk about what you’ve just read. Talk about the plot, what you’ve learned, when or where it’s happening, and more.
6. When you talk about what you learn in your own words, you make the information your own.
7. How can you best relate the information to people?
8. The best way is to talk to someone live in front of you.
9. The second-best way is to talk to someone on the phone.
10. The third-best way is to talk to a live non-human, like a pet or plant.
11. The fourth way is to speak to an inanimate object, like your voice recorder or a bottle of water.
12. There’s not that much difference between speaking to a human and an inanimate object. The important part is that you’re not talking to yourself. You must externally verbalize about what you’ve read
13. If you’re speaking to another human being, asking them to ask you questions will further boost your comprehension.

The third R stands for wRite

1. Talking out loud about what you’ve read causes you to make the information your own. So does writing about it.
2. Taking notes is one of the best ways to retain what you read.
3. Handwrite your notes.
4. Split your paper in half, so you’re using one side of the page to take notes and the other side to make them. Learn more about this process in Kwik Brain 013: How to Take Notes for Rapid Recall‍
5. We also have a grid system we explain in our Kwik Reading program.

If you want to go deeper into this, join our flagshipKwik Reading program – which boosts your reading speed up to 300%! Click here to learn how you too can boost your reading speed, focus, retention, comprehension, AND enjoyment.