Speed Reading
by Alan Pritt
Most people don’t have the time to read them all and become overwhelmed.
But what if we could read at twice, 3 times, 10 times, or even 50 times the average reading speed? That would surely help relieve the onslaught.
Now imagine that your comprehension can improve at the same time.
Too good to be true? This is the claim of speed reading; but can it live up to its claims?
Read on...
Speed reading: Does it work?
So does speed reading work? I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you one of those annoying yes and no answers. Really it depends on how you apply it and what you apply it to.
Speed reading teaches you to cast your eyes over the words in a faster manner. One of the first techniques I learnt was simply to concentrate on reading fast for a few pages. When you return to your natural speed this will usually be quicker. You probably won’t notice this though – because it is so natural it will seem to be the same speed as before.
The main focus of speed reading, however, is getting you to move your eyes over the text in a more efficient manner. For example, it teaches you to take in several words, lines or paragraphs in one chunk; instead of reading the text one word at a time.
When you see people guide a finger or pen down the centre of a page, this helps them to speed up by guiding their eye smoothly down the page.
There is a downside to this though, and I’ll talk about that in a few moments.
Can speed reading improve comprehension?
Yes it can. It may seem counterintuitive that reading faster and taking in more information at once will improve comprehension, but it can do.
If you are a poor reader, you will be taking in only a word or two at a time. More advanced readers take in several words at a time – even whole paragraphs at a time. And they don’t necessarily read the words in order!
This improves comprehension because we make connections between different parts of the text to make the meanings. If you think about it, a word on its own doesn’t say much. If we take the word ‘with’ for example, it doesn’t really mean anything. First you need to put it in a sentence such as ‘I arrived with my friend’. It is the connections between these words that make the meaning.
Speed reading helps because we widen our sights to more than one word at a time. This helps us to make connections and recognise patterns in the text which help our understanding.
There are important ways to make this much more effective, but first a warning.
Different speeds for different reads
Speed reading courses teach you how to move your eyes across the page at faster rates. This is good for reading easy text, but with something more difficult, the comprehension will fall. And as our comprehension lowers and we continue to push ourselves further, we become anxious.
For this reason, many people give up on speed reading. It simply becomes too stressful.
My advice is just to use speed reading when it is comfortable. Where you know the subject well you can read quicker. For more difficult passages, you can slow down.
Some things simply need to be read with more care, some things can be skimmed over, and some things can be skipped over completely. Your speed should naturally alter depending on the material you are reading.
Experiment.
Speed reading, then, would appear to have severe limits in its use. Luckily there is a lot more to effective reading than being able to cast our eyes over the words quicker. If you really want to improve your comprehension while speed reading, you need to start approaching reading in a completely new way...
Building the framework of meaning
As stated above, comprehension becomes easier when it is related to the rest of the text.
The key to improving understanding (and with it, speed) is to make more relationships between the parts of the text. Reading in the traditional manner makes this very difficult. Speed reading makes it easier.
But there is much more to this process than just taking in the words faster.
Here are some more tips...
Begin with a purpose
Before you begin to read anything, decide what you want to get out of it. This will awaken certain parts of your brain, which will then be ready to take in new information.
When you read without a purpose, you run the risk of not taking anything in at all. If you’ve ever read a page of writing, and then realised you haven’t got a clue what any of it said, you will know this is true.
Explore the text
Unless you’re reading something like a fiction book, where you don’t want to spoil the ending, it is rarely necessary to read in a linear fashion. You simply do not need to start at page one and read line by line until you reach the back cover.
We are programmed to read in a linear fashion because that was how we were taught when we were kids. But unless it is a novel and we don’t want to spoil the ending, we are doing ourselves a big disservice by reading in this way.
Reading in a linear manner is, in fact, a very unnatural way of absorbing the information. The problem with reading in a linear fashion is that we miss more. The stuff that we read at the beginning of a text is usually forgotten, or has at least become vague by time we reach the end.
Reading in a more dynamic way matches how we naturally remember things. Memorising the information and understanding it becomes a lot easier.
If you’ve read some of my articles on memory, you will know that we remember things by a process of connections. In order to memorise something new, we need to connect to something we already know. With speed reading we begin by creating a few memory hooks for us to connect the rest of the text to.
I like to think of reading as an exploration. In front of me is a world of knowledge and information, and I just want to dive in and experience it. Reading in the traditional manner involves staying on the well trodden path and following the set route – step by step.
With speed reading we can leave the path, climb trees, see the wildlife, swim… it’s much more interesting.
It all starts by taking in the big picture first.
Take in the main frame work of the material before you worry about the specifics. If you’re reading a book, flip through it quickly to get a general feel for it. Then read the contents, chapter titles, subheadings, bullet points, et cetera.
Then read the introduction and conclusion. Finally go through the book another time, and try to find answers to questions that have arisen from your first few scans.The idea is for this to become a more active interaction with the book. As we find more information, we develop more questions and we can look for more answers. On each pass through the text we get a deeper and deeper understanding.
Think of the process like you are exploring a new landscape. When you arrive you stand and take in the whole picture. You see the fields, the hills, the barn, the woods, the horses, the sky, etc. You can absorb it in one go, but at this point you don’t know it well. The next step is to get to know the new landscape, so you feed the horses for a few minutes, then check out the barn, then explore the woods, etc. Gradually, you take in more and more, and get to know the ins and outs of that place. Each time discovering something new.
Reading in the manner described above means you take in the big picture first (the chapter headings, the subheadings, the conclusions, the introduction, etc). This creates a general framework for all the rest of the information to hang from. Understanding becomes much easier, and with it, memorisation and speed.
Memorisation is improved because you keep going over the key concepts time and time again. Understanding is improved because you make connections in understanding on different levels and across the scope of the book, article or report.
You don’t have to read everything
This method also has another benefit. Most of the time, we don’t need to know the entirety of an article or book. But even so we often read through lots of information that we don’t really care about. We read word after word that is irrelevant, we become bored because we already know some of what we are reading, and we run out of time before we get to what we need to know.
Reading in this more dynamic way means we get to the important stuff first and skip past anything that is irrelevant. This saves a lot of time.
Go faster than speed reading with PhotoReading
Now we move onto something more controversial...
Is it possible to read at a rate of over 25,000 words per minute?
That’s faster than a page per second!
Sounds impossible, but that is the claim of Photo Reading.
The claim is that using the unconscious mind, we can take in thousands of times the information we can take in with the conscious mind. So we turn off our conscious mind and just trust that we are taking in the information.
While this is happening, we don’t consciously know what we are reading. But in a later step, called ‘activation’ we can gain access to a whole load of material that we didn’t realise we had taken in.
If you’re sceptical, that’s good. I was sceptical as well. In fact I still am. But I have an open enough mind to try these things, so a few days ago I began reading the book that describes this technique.
I was pleasantly surprised.
Although I’m still not sure whether the PhotoReading stage actually works, the rest of the sections describe very good reading practice. If you follow the advice in this book, you will definitely become a far better reader. For this reason alone, the book is well worth the money.
A chap called Pete Bissonette has been recorded as reading at 693,000 words per minute. That is the equivalent of reading 10 books a minute! This was done by flashing US patents at him on a screen. Afterwards he was tested and he had taken it in with 75% comprehension!
Sounds unbelievable, doesn’t it?
Lots of people are very sceptical about PhotoReading. This is not surprising. The claim that you can read 25,000+ words per minute is quite extraordinary. To further add to the scepticism photo reading does not provide immediate comprehension. In other words, while you are reading, you don’t know what you are taking in – instead it comes at a later stage.
I’m personally only just getting started with PhotoReading so I can’t give my personal opinion on whether I think it works as claimed or not. But the processes surrounding the actual Photo Reading step are so beneficial, that the book is worth the money anyway.
It incorporates the steps I outlined above, in much more detail and with more explanation than I can possibly give in this article.
Whether the actual PhotoReading step works or not, I’m not sure. But that step takes such a small amount of time that I’m willing to take it on faith for now. Certainly following the concepts in that book have skyrocketed my reading speeds.
With the possibility of reading as fast as we can turn the page, I think it is definitely worth looking into more deeply. If you wish to you can find out more here:
Or you can just get the book here:
