My technique for speed reading is to read really fast. Doing so just comes naturally, or at least it feels that way. I was a very early reader as a child, which

My technique for speed reading is to read really fast. Doing so just comes naturally, or at least it feels that way. I was a very early reader as a child, which I bet correlates strongly with being a fast reader thereafter. I do find that for material that's heavier going my retention is worse than I'd like it to be. I don't know whether that's just because I'm unrealistically optimistic about what ought to be achievable, or whether my reading speed is tuned for easier stuff because, e.g., in those formative childhood years most of what you read is relatively easy, syntactically at least. (For stuff that's conceptually difficult, the prescription is the same whatever your reading speed: put the book down and think/scribble/experiment, read multiple times, force yourself to express the key ideas in your own words, etc.)