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Reading Tips for Teens and Adults

Do you wish it was easier to read – perhaps even a pleasure?

We’ll look at how to make it easier on your eyes, how to build vocabulary a bit at a time, even how to improve your ability with a second language.

Reading In the Right Place

Often people who are neurodiverse have difficulty just working efficiently. Everything seems to take longer.

Learning in the right place makes it more efficient.

So how do you find out what works best for you? Here’s a first check we give to all our students.

Find a text, a piece of writing that’s just at the edge of your ability. You can read it, but it’s a bit hard.

Try reading texts at the same level in different settings.

Sitting in a chair, at a desk, leaning on the desk, sitting up straight, standing at the windowsill, standing at a standing desk, sitting on the floor, sitting on a yoga ball or in a rocking chair, lying on the floor.

What works for you? Try all the variations you can think of and reflect. Was it easier? Was it harder?

One of our students discovered that the best way for her to read was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and her arms around her knees, holding the book. She felt safe and secure and stable there.

She asked her lecturers to allow her to sit like that during lectures. They agreed. She said that for the first time she understood the lecture without having to use the recordings.

It doesn’t take long to find out where you read most efficiently, where you read most effectively, but it’s time well spent. It’s an investment in the efficiency of all your future learning.

Reading: Grasp the Meaning

Do you need to read again and again before you get it?

Let’s talk about how to get the new content connected with what you already know.

If you’re neurodiverse, often learning things one at a time is problematic. There’s nowhere to catch the new ideas, nowhere to hold them, no way to really remember what’s going on.

You may learn best if you can connect new information to what you already know. So here’s how to go about it. It’s called active learning.

Say you’re about to read an article. Look at the title. Look at the header line. Think about what you already know about the topic.

Make a mind map if you like mind maps, or bullet points if you prefer those. Or maybe even draw a picture about everything you already know about that topic.

If you can, add in things that have personal meaning to you, things that trigger emotion, any kind of emotion, because emotion is good glue.

Now think of three things you’d hope to learn in the article, and jot those down as three questions. Any questions work as hooks. If you can’t think of good ones try who, what, where and when.

Now read the article. Perhaps it answered your questions. Add what you’ve learned to your mind map or bullets.

This technique often makes a big difference.

Individualized Reading

Have you ever wished you could enjoy reading like other people? You can learn to enjoy reading, get involved in the story, see it in your mind’s eye.

Here’s one way to go about it.

The trick is to read things at exactly the right level. Not too hard and not too easy either.

Choose a text where there’s maybe one tricky word in 100 words. That’s your learning level. Read at that learning level for half an hour a day. You’ll find that your reading ability changes and you can gradually get slightly more difficult text. It usually only takes about six weeks.

What used to be tricky is to find the right text. Children’s books are sometimes marked with this or that level. Your reading content is not. Here’s where AI can help.

Find content that is available electronically (and is interesting to you). Use AI to adapt it for you. Start at a level that is lower than what you need. Like “Rewrite this with a reading age of 8”. Work the age setting up until you get the magic number — about one tricky word in every hundred.

Using AI you can also change the color of the background, the font (type and size) and the spacing to your liking.

Every week increase the reading age until you get to real books again.

You’re not alone! We’ve worked with university students who hated reading and learned to enjoy it using this technique.

Using AI to Expand Your Vocabulary — When the Material You Are Reading Is Difficult

If you are dyslexic, dyspraxic, on the spectrum or have ADHD, you may have trouble understanding some reading material.

When you move on to another level of education or you want to look up something complex on the Internet, what comes up may be hard to read. Perhaps you’re taking a class and some of the concepts are just hard to understand.

Perhaps you don’t have the relevant background knowledge, or the vocabulary to take it in, understand it, process it and use what you have just read.

So what do you do?

  • Step 1. Read it in short sections. Perhaps 100 words, a paragraph, or the abstract of the article. With every such section, make note of one thing you’ve learned and one thing you would still like to know.
  • Step 2. Feed the section into the AI program and ask it to explain it to a ten year old. Read that explanation. Add what you know now to your notes. Think about the differences.
  • Step 3 (optional). Ask the AI program to explain it to a four year old. Seriously, some material (in our experience – technical stuff, such as IT, or logic), sometimes really starts making sense with this step.
  • Step 4. Go back to the original and reread the original. Why bother? Because this gives your brain the chance to read the original version with the understanding you bring to the reading. You may find that the meaning, vocabulary, concepts, are now clearer.
By taking these steps you can begin to read independently at the level that you’re aiming for. Which is of course the goal of this exercise.

Reading In a Second Language — What to Do When It’s Tough

Are you studying in a second or third language? Do you sometimes find that you read an article and you have to start all over when you get to the end?

Try this: Read the article once. Then use Google Translate to translate it to your first language (mother tongue). Read it in your first language (even if you’re not feeling fluent) and then in the original language again.

Yes, you’ve read it three times, but it’s not like reading it three times in the same language. You’re making new connections in the brain, between your mother tongue and the language you are using now to learn.

One of our students found that after doing this with five or six articles he was reading in his new language much more fluently. He no longer needed translation and he got the information he needed.

Read More Easily — When Just Looking at the Text Is Exhausting

Do you have a hard time understanding and remembering what you’ve just read?

It may be about how hard your eyes have to work.

If your eyes are working hard it leaves less processing power for remembering what you read. Or even for thinking.

Four simple things to make it easier when reading online:

Copy some text onto a word editing document so that you can try things out.

  • Bigger font. Choose a section and make it size 14. Does it make reading easier?
  • Bigger spacing. Increase the spacing between the lines to 1.5 or 2. Has this helped?
  • Background color. Perhaps black on a pastel color will work for you (Green? Blue? Tan? Something else?). Perhaps you’ll like white text on a black background (people with ADHD often do). Did this work for you?
  • Different font. We like Verdana and similar ones that are not serifed. Did you come up with a favorite — not necessarily the prettiest, but one that makes it easier on the eyes?
People with ASD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and other learning challenges may find these tools particularly helpful. If more than one change is helpful to you, try combining them.
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