Reading well takes time, patience, and practice. The most important thing to figure out is the purpose of your reading: looking at instructions to build furniture and studying a textbook are not the same thing! Once you’ve figured out your purpose, you can choose to focus on what are known as intensive reading techniques that stress things like vocabulary and speed.

The first step in reading anything is seeing the words. Earlier, the speed reader was a person who was able to identify words much faster.