To Read Nonfiction Faster, Do This Before You Read

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "10 Days to Faster Reading" by The Princeton Language Institute and Abby Marks Beale. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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What should you do before you read a work of nonfiction? How can reading more content actually help you read faster?

The authors of 10 Days to Faster Reading offer this surprising speed-reading strategy: Familiarize yourself with the content before you begin. It might seem like you’re taking unnecessary extra time, but you’ll be able to read faster—and with more comprehension—when you take this step.

Let’s take a closer look at this reading strategy.

Before You Read

According to the authors, it’s helpful to briefly familiarize yourself with the content of a nonfiction text before you start reading in earnest. (Shortform note: In How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren describe inspectional reading, a similar process for previewing a text. It’s the second of their four reading levels, and its purpose is to understand the structure and the main points of a text. That way, you have the background knowledge and context you need to efficiently process the information before you read the body of the text in depth. They advise setting a target of 15 minutes to gain an overview of a 300-page book.)

In addition to assisting you with Strategy #1 (be selective about what you read), this strategy helps you meet the following three goals:

1) Getting a sense of the structure and topics covered. Almost all nonfiction writing follows an internal outline that offers a map of the topics covered. This strategy takes advantage of that framework to give you a clear overview of what you’re about to read.

(Shortform note: The internal outline is also important in nonfiction texts because it helps readers understand the author’s narrative thread throughout the piece. If a text has a clear structure, readers can follow the main points and argument without getting lost in the details. A lack of a clear outline and the author going off on too many tangents can undermine the main point of the piece.)

2) Improving your reading efficiency by giving you context and direction for a text. When you don’t familiarize yourself with a text beforehand, you don’t know where it’s going. Therefore, you may be unsure what you’re supposed to get from it. This often makes it more difficult to concentrate and understand what you’re reading. As you struggle to figure out what you’re supposed to be learning, you read more slowly.

(Shortform note: Some research suggests that looking over a text before reading improves comprehension as well as efficiency. Previewing allows you to connect the broad ideas you see in the text to any prior knowledge you have of the subject, aiding in your understanding of the ideas once you begin fully reading.)

3) Reviewing a text after reading it previously. (Shortform note: This could be particularly useful when studying or reviewing information in advance of a meeting or presentation.)

To pre-familiarize yourself with the contents of your nonfiction reading material, the authors suggest identifying and reading certain elements of the text before working through its main body. We’ll highlight two sets of elements here: 1) the title, introduction, headings, and conclusion, and 2) details about the author and the book’s copyright.