Speed Reading: Teach Yourself a New Way to Read

Posted by writer on October 5th, 2008 at 10:07am

No matter what your reading and comprehension abilities are, you can learn to read faster with a well designed speed reading program. It’s also possible to keep your comprehension levels where they are, or even improve them.

In a speed reading course participants are taught to scan through the material quickly. They learn to bypass useless information and search out the relevant points. The goal is to read complete sentences as a single unit rather than focusing on each word in order to pick up the gist of the reading material.

An example of particularly difficult reading material is a technical manual containing endless pages of detailed information. But with speed reading you can manage it more quickly and also remember the content more completely. This is critical, since if they can’t remember half of what they read, they may have to go back and read through it more than once.

When children first learn to read, they read a word and pronounce it out loud to be sure they recognize it. Then they move on to the next word. And as they get older, they continue to use this rather inefficient way of reading. With a speed reading program, however, your brain can learn to read faster and more efficiently.

Speed reading programs were first introduced in 1958 by Evelyn Woods in Australia. In the years that followed, speed reading has taken on ever more popularity, in particular the ability to absorb lots of information.

Speed reading programs are available in an assortment of different methods. These have all been formulated to teach people how to increase their reading speed. Some naysayers, however, charge that some of these programs increase reading speed at the expense of comprehension. Many participants in speed reading competitions can get through a thousand hours and more in an hour. But their comprehension rate is only around 50%.

Some claim that this is the problem with many of the speed reading programs. The success of these programs is measured entirely on speed rather than on the ability to understand and retain the meaning of the text. These are also quite important, in particular with regards to technical information.

When looking for a speed reading program to improve your reading speed, look for one that can improve comprehension and retention, along with speed. When you put these new skills into action, you’ll find it easier to get the information you need from any of your reading materials.

Tags: speed reading

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