1. Comprehension Skills

Speed Reading Guide: Comprehension Skills
Overview :
• Main Ideas And Supporting Ideas
• 'Debate' With The Author
• Literal And Implied Meaning
• Conclusion
1. Main Ideas And Supporting Ideas
Comprehension is a central aspect of reading. Since reading is based on understanding the ideas or concepts in the text, good comprehension skills can improve your reading speed dramatically.
In any form of writing, each paragraph comprises of both the main ideas and supporting ideas. If you learn how to distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting ideas, you’ll understand how the ideas are developed to deliver a coherent message, and also the interrelationships between the ideas.
The main idea of a paragraph is usually stated in the first sentence, and this is commonly known as the topic sentence of the paragraph. The topic sentence is a sentence which concisely describes the main idea and sums up all the supporting details of the paragraph.
For example, take a look at the following paragraph and answer the questions that follow:
Speed reading is now an essential skill in our knowledge-based economy. Since information is being produced at an ever-increasing rate, people in the workplace have a heavier workload because they need to manage more information. Indeed, statistics show that a rising number of people are falling sick from stress at work, and this is largely attributed to information overload. However, if people can manage the ever-increasing information load by reading and understanding text at a higher speed, they can reduce the stress they face at work. This is the critical role that speed reading plays in our lives now.
What is the main idea of the paragraph above? (The topic sentence)
Speed reading is now an essential skill in our knowledge-based economy.
Which are the supporting ideas?
The supporting ideas are presented from the 2 nd sentence to the 2 nd last sentence. The last sentence is the conclusion.
For good comprehension, you must have the skill to accurately identify the main ideas of all the paragraphs, so that you can have a clear ‘picture’ of how each main idea supports one another to deliver the central message. This helps your comprehension tremendously.
2. ‘Debate’ With The Author
To be a skilled reader, you’ve to take reading like a ‘debate session’ with the author. This means that you constantly ask questions about the text, ponder about the ideas presented by the author, evaluate and form responses to the text.
Reading is not a passive activity in which you move your eyes mechanically across line after line of the text, and accept the author’s ideas without question. To have good comprehension, you also need to keep ‘debating’ with the author.
For instance, if you read this sentence:
‘To be an effective speed reader, you need to know how to read ‘smart’.’
You can immediately form a response question like ‘What does it mean to read ‘smart’?’ or ‘How does reading ‘smart’ increase my reading speed?’
Such questions show that you’ve already understood the meaning of the sentence, and have considered its meaning from many angles. Your comprehension will be much better than for people who simply read the sentence and accept the meaning passively.
During reading, you should also evaluate the text carefully. The following are some points to ask yourself for your evaluation:
• Does the evidence provided by the author support his main ideas strongly?
• What is the author’s purpose of writing? Are his ideas relevant to his purpose?
• Do the ideas transition smoothly from one to the next, or are they disorganized?
Evaluating the text helps your comprehension because you need a strong understanding of the text before you can form your own opinions about it.
3. Literal And Implied Meaning
To understand any piece of writing well, you need to be able to understand both the literal meaning and the implied meaning of the text.
The literal meaning of a sentence is the exact meaning that the words convey. For example, ‘My university classes start in august’ has no other implied or suggested meaning.
On the other hand, the implied meaning of a sentence refers to an additional level of meaning that can be deduced from what the sentence suggests. You can usually infer the suggested meaning by paying attention to the clues in the sentence.
For example, ‘His face turned purple and his eyebrows furrowed on hearing the news’.
From the clues in the sentence, you can deduce that he became angry on hearing the news – the implied meaning. You can also infer that the news must have been terrible or shocking.
The key to understand the implied meaning of the text is to immerse yourself completely in the context. You need to continually form associations between what you read and what you already know. Anticipating how the author will develop his ideas next also helps you to draw inferences and grasp the implied meaning of the text.
Understanding the author’s implied meaning is important for good comprehension of any piece of writing. If you understand the text fully, you’ll not have to deliberately reread the text again, as is the case for readers with poorer comprehension. Thus, your reading speed is faster than those who cannot grasp the implied meaning of the text.
4. Conclusion
The main purpose of reading is to extract and understand the ideas from the text. With better comprehension skills, your reading will naturally improve, and so will your reading speed.

All techniques are taken from our 136pg speed reading course titled, 'The Definitive Speed Reading Course.'
For more information on how to obtain this course, visit:
http://www.mindpower.co.nz