Have you ever taken a reading test at school? The ones that test how fast you read? Well, turns out that reading slowly is actually more helpful than reading quickly. In the Ted Talk “What Reading Slowly Taught me About Writing” by Jacqueline Woodson, my perspective on reading actually took a turn.
Reading slowly can not only allow you to enhance and deepen your understanding and connection to the story, but also helps to diminish your stress level. When you read slower, you can concentrate harder on each word and not think about anything else. And when focus more on the story, you tend to ponder more about it and catch unobtrusive details that may reveal a lot about the plot, or the theme. This also leads to a decrease in stress levels. This happens because once all your focus is on one specific thing, you’ll be absorbed by the book and forget about the things that are stressing you out.
You might be wondering why reading quickly is bad. However, there are always two sides of the problem. Reading quickly may cause you to rush, and whenever you’re in a rush, there are ominous results. For one thing, rushing causes you to panic, which also causes stress. This is one of the biggest lose-lose situations of reading quickly. It takes away the purpose of reading, which could be to calm down, or lower stress levels. One of the good things of reading quickly is being able to read and extensive amount of books in a short period. Allowing you to find books that could be more interesting or finding a genre of books that you find mundane.
However, this does not apply to everyone, since everyone’s brain works a different way. Some people may find that reading quickly allows them to absorb more books, and when they find a book they enjoy throughly, they can take time to slow down and reread it. On the other hand, there are people who like to take things slower and just spend more time on each book than speeding through them. Whichever way you prefer, if you want to understand a book deeply, it requires rereading, mulling, reflecting, and you being able to fathom every part of it.