If adults are interested in improving their reading, they may have a little bit of trouble deciding what they should do and how. If you have a high school, college or graduate degree, your speed, word recognition, and vocabulary are probably pretty good. You might use a course or an app or other methods to try to train yourself to comprehend more words per minute but if you do, you may find that taking pleasure in the associations that come to mind is hampered. Reading something of interest may be too interesting to waste, too interesting to hurry through or shove aside. For business reading, general comprehension along with highlights of parts that you want to be able to return to may be the ticket. But for personal reading, greater speed may mean less pleasure and less satisfaction.
I spoke to a professor of reading, who trains reading specialists, who advised a senior adult to find ways to read something that is enjoyable that can be discussed with friends or others who are also reading the same thing. Talking about something that you enjoy or even that strongly turns you off helps with interacting with the text. For most reading most of the time, only some parts of the text, parts you especially value or disagree with, are the parts you want to be able to indicate and discuss.
I imagine that a number of senior adults suspect that they are slower at reading than average. The professor said that speed is irrelevant. Naturally, if one's reading speed is TOO slow, that alone is going to hamper reading enjoyment. I think for most readers, immersion in a world, in a voice, whether fictional dark alley or factual chem lab, is a large part of the pleasure of reading. If the speed is very, very slow, that might interfere with good immersion. As I have mentioned in this blog, these days, reading is quite slow for me since I am often interrupting myself to look up a term or an idea on Google or Wikipedia, check the biography of the author or someone mentioned or look at other works by the author or someone else on Amazon.
My advice: practice sticking to the text, just reading it for the sake of seeing what it says. As a student, I would rarely make notes but these days, I share parts of a book that interest me. Sharing for me means marking the passage on a Kindle page, sending a Tweet about the passage and sharing the Tweet and location in the book on kindle.amazon.com, a computer that keeps readers' highlights. Sharing enables me to find the parts that mattered and use them in this blog or elsewhere. It also sharpens my interest in staying alert for the good bits. All of the steps of sharing are compressed into one fast operation with a Kindle.
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
