Improving your reading is a very important topic, and the question that you might have right now is, “Can I have bad reading habits?” Yes, you can, and the great news is, you can train yourself to become more efficient when working with information. Or you might be thinking, “Is this article relevant for me?” The fact is, if you or someone you know have any of the seven pain points or rather seven bad habits, we will look at you, or they can improve your reading skills. We will be using creative examples to simplify the process. Let’s go:

1. Reading and moving your lips is called sub vocalisation, and the funny thing is, you usually don’t even know you are doing it! (Check your friend at school, once you start noticing this, you will be shocked how many of us do this.) We subvocalise because we are using the scenic (‘phonological’) route while working with information. The main result is that your reading speed will not nearly be what it could be because of the process or route your brain follows when reading. It is lovely to take your time when you have all the time in the world, but not when you have a job to do. Therefore, it is important to develop silent reading fluency and reading speed sufficiently. Imagine the result if your entire office/class were reading aloud all the time… Eish!

2. My eyes move very slowly when I read, and I lose my place often. This can be likened to not being “reading fit”; at the end of the day, you lose a lot of time and efficiency because of a little silly habit. When your eye stops for too long at a word, you are dawdling while you are reading. When switching to the next line, you might often skip two or three sentences and miss pockets of information in the process. This tedious process of reading requires A LOT of focus and attention. Putting the whole picture of the information together proves to be very difficult.

3. I lose focus while reading because my mind wanders even though my eyes are reading the text. Therefore you need to read the same information a couple of times. Re-reading is a symptom that can be pretty time-consuming. The way you work with information requires you to read, reread, and reread multiple times versus reading it once and knowing, remembering, understanding what you’ve read. This can be linked to congestion and traffic that has been rerouted and then comes to a complete standstill. Not ideal, especially if you have limited time. This happens when there is no endurance; in other words… we are not involved in the process right now, but rather continue on autopilot… you wake up halfway… miss the journey… and will need to “re-do” that part; otherwise, you will not know what happened.

4. I don’t understand what I am reading. You read the information, but you have no prior knowledge or purpose in reading the information. Reading in this way can be likened to having traffic, but there is no “destination” and a lot of confusion… The process is “busy”,… yet this way of reading leads to frustration… “Why do I need to read this?” Is a common question here. There is no relevance in completing the exercise.

5. The language level is challenging; a lot of energy goes into reading the words- identifying the meaning, interpreting the message and understanding it in context. Unknown vocabulary can bog down your energy and enthusiasm, and ability to think creatively about new information… leading to a slow and painful experience. It’s like reading your map in a foreign language, where you rely on the limited background knowledge you have to try and follow the directions. So chances are it’s going to be a journey that isn’t very pleasant.11:36