Speed-reading gets even easier when you can recognize common phrases. Here, predictability plays a significant role because when you already know what’s coming, there’s no need to read it. You can skip over the things that you already know and thus cut your reading rate even more. Since we are all pretty familiar with most idioms, cliches, and figures of speech, we can ignore them when they appear in text.

Some example idioms, cliches, and figures of speech are “It’s raining cats and dogs,” “you put the sun in sunshine,” “the world wide web…” etc. You only need to see the first one or two words of an idiom to know how the rest of it goes, and the same follows for cliches and figures of speech. Being familiarized with the majority of them means you don’t have to waste time processing them while you’re reading.

Exercise 8

First, cover Table #2 with a sheet of paper. Then look at only the first or first two words of the cliches in Table #1 while trying to predict how it ends. When finished, uncover Table #1 to see how accurate you were.

How well did you do? Could you use a little more practice? If not, let see the role vocabulary plays.