5 Ways To Minimize Subvocalization:

1. Use Your Hand to Guide Your Eyes While Reading

We keep on emphasizing the importance of using your hand to guide your eyes. It’s a central
principle to all speed-reading techniques and it’s something that will help you minimize
subvocalization. Using your hand to guide your eyes will also help you grab groups of words
while reading, helping you avoid another common reading habit, fixation.

2. Distract Yourself
To minimize subvocalization, try distracting yourself from saying words in your head. How
should you distract yourself? There are a couple of ways to do it. One way is try to chew gum
while you read. If you chew gum while reading it will distract you from saying the words in your
head.

You can also distract yourself from saying words by occupying that voice in your head with
another voice. Try counting from one to three while you are reading the material (example: “one,
two three” line-by-line). While you are doing this, try fixating your eyes somewhere at the
beginning of the line, somewhere in the middle of the line, and somewhere at the end of the line.
While you are looking in those three places you want to be counting “one, two, three.” By doing
this you will also be fixating on three groups of words, rather than each and every single word.
You can count “one, two, three” out loud (maybe whispering) or in your head. Either way, you’ll
distract yourself from saying the actual words you are reading. With some practice, you’ll find it
easier to avoid saying all the words in your head as you read.

3. Listen To Music While Reading

This will not only help you minimize subvocalization, but listening to music may also help you
concentrate better. However, keep in mind that not all types of music are going to help you
concentrate. You want to avoid listening to music with lyrics or anything with a strong beat
because it is going to throw off your concentration. You may also want to avoid listening to
songs that remind you of other things (your high school sweetheart, a fight scene from a movie
or anything else that might further distract you).

Listen to something that is instrumental. Classical music usually works best. That will help you
to improve your concentration and it will also help you to minimize your habit of
subvocalization.

4. Use the AccelaReader RSVP Application

AccelaReader uses Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) to help you boost your reading
speed and minimize subvocalization. The application is simple to use. You simply paste the text
you want to read into a textbox. Set your reading speed and press play. The words then blink on
the screen at the speed that you set. You can also choose how many words you want to blink at a
time.
I recommend setting a speed of at least 300 words per minute. Anything higher than that will
help you avoid subvocalizing all the words. The faster you go, the less words you will be able to
say in your head. With some practice, you’ll find it easier to minimize this habit of
subvocalization.

5. Force Yourself To Read Faster Than You Normally Would

Let’s say you normally read 250 wpm. Try going a little faster (maybe 300 or 350 wpm). If you
force yourself to go a little faster than you normally read, you’ll minimize the amount of words
you say in your head. In addition to minimizing subvocalization, you’ll also improve your focus
because you have to pay attention more when you read a little faster. Again, the more you
practice pushing yourself faster, the faster you will get.

Conclusion
As I mentioned earlier, many speed-reading programs tend to exaggerate what is possible by
falsely claiming that you can eliminate subvocalization. Your goal should be to minimize this
habit, not eliminate it. The five tips mentioned above will help you minimize the habit of
subvocalization so you can start reading at the speed of thought.

FIXATION
There are lots of causes of a greater number of fixations, so there is no single simple remedy to fix it.
Whatever the people behind the speed reading industry – the people who are selling the books, programs,
and courses say – nobody can substitute for you. You are the one who needs to work on your vocabulary
or topic familiarity.

Techniques can help you only in the "technical" aspect. You can expand your vision span with exercises,
but it won't do you much good, if you don't understand every third word in some professional periodical.

Eye span pyramid

There are different kinds of pyramids - with single words, sentences, and numbers. You are supposed to
read them from the apex to the bottom, keeping your view in the middle of the pyramid. The vertical
moves of eyeballs are not allowed.
When the text is too wide for you to read it with one fixation, then stop, close your eyes for a few seconds,
open them again focusing your view in the middle of the pyramid, and try to see as many words as
possible on the both sides of the line.

Shultz tables

This is a tool to train your vision span. A table consists of 25 fields filled with symbols. They are usually
numbers, but they also can be letters or any kind of symbols that can be arranged in a specific order.
Doing exercises with Shultz tables develops your three-dimensional, multi-channeled attention. The
symbols in the table will subconsciously be perceived as one picture.

Your purpose is to concentrate your view on the center field, whilst being able to see the central number
and all the numbers in the corners of a table. Then, you find the numbers in ascending or descending
order as fast as you can, keeping your view focused on the central square of the table.

At the beginning, you can start with smaller tables - 3x3 or 4x4 fields. You should be able to point out all
numbers in less than one minute. Try to find the numbers faster with each successive exercise.

I like Shultz tables the most of all the exercises expanding the field of vision. They are relatively easy to
create, and numbers in each of them are arranged in a random manner. It is not so easy to randomly
create pyramids or columns of words or numbers. I found some PDF documents, printed them and used
them for the practice sessions. After several iterations, I had all the text and numbers memorized and
couldn't use them effectively.

Shultz's tables generator - on my site; it generates random tables for offline practice. I use them for my
own practices. It's not very user friendly, but it does its job. I prefer 5x5 dimensions of the tables. To
generate new set of tables, just press the "back" button in the browser and press the "generate" button
once again. Try different browsers and different printer settings to get an ideal size on the paper sheet.
Fixation training

The next stage of expanding your vision span is to create a fixation habit. To have a wide vision span is
fine and good, but we were taught to read a text word by word, so we need to develop new reading habits -
to jump just a few times over a text line with our eyesight. I've just started this kind of training - this is as
far as my personal program has gotten so far.

You should develop the habit of moving your eyesight just a couple times per line. I used pre-prepared
texts and, more or less, I memorized them. To work on a new text with every practice session, you need a
template with dots marking the stopping points for your eye. It's a little fuss to copy a new text to a
template file and print it every time, but it's much better than working on a text you've already read
several times.

This kind of reading also helps tremendously with fighting off a regression. You consciously force yourself
to read chunks of text jumping from one to another, and there is no going back in this method. You train
this way of reading as long as it's necessary to develop a new subconscious habit.

Fixation: conclusion

No "technical" exercises will help you to enrich your vocabulary or general knowledge. You must work on
them on your own. If you worked on some text previously a couple of times, the training of your eyes
transforms into the training of your memory. You need a source of fresh reading materials for your
practice sessions.

Regression (backtracking)

Regression is the unnecessary re-reading of material. It is possible get into the habit of skipping back to
words you have just read or of jumping back a few sentences, just to make sure that you read something
right. When you regress like this, you lose the flow and structure of the text, and your overall
understanding of the subject can decrease. Be very conscious of regression, and don’t allow yourself to re-
read material unless you absolutely have to. To reduce the number of times your eyes skip back, run a
pointer (a finger, a pen, or the cursor) along the line as you read. Your eyes will follow the tip of your
pointer, helping you avoid skipping back. The speed at which you read using this method will largely
depend on the speed at which you move the pointer.