Way back around 2003, I had a web page on the intranet at my first programming job. And on that web page, I wrote that you could count much faster if you didn’t say the numbers in your head as you counted. In fact, I wrote, you could only count as fast as you could talk, which is REALLY slowly once you get into two- and three-syllable digits. The possibility of counting almost as fast as I could move my eyes or cycle my brain really excited me.

Fast forward 10 years, and now I know that mentally “saying” words as you read them has a fancy name: subvocalization. Eliminating or reducing it is a key to improving your reading speed.

If I had 2014 resolutions, one would be to increase my reading speed. I haven’t found many great resources yet, but Tim Ferriss is always solid. Here’s one of his posts on speed reading…

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and-accelerated-learning/