Speed Reading: Teach Yourself a New Way to Read
No matter what your reading and comprehension abilities are, you can learn to read faster with a well designed speed reading program. As well, your comprehension abilities are maintained, and sometimes they even get better.
Speed reading programs train people to quickly search through the text. They are taught to ignore irrelevant information and pick out only the pertinent parts. 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.
In particular, technical materials can be difficult to read, and they often run to a thousand pages or more. However, you can get through them quite rapidly if you learn to speed read while still gleaning the most important material. 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. They then do the same with each word that follows. This methodical and slow moving process of reading is retained as time goes by. But a speed reading program can retrain the brain to learn a better, faster way to read.
Speed reading programs were first introduced in 1958 by Evelyn Wood in Australia. Since then, learning to read faster has become extremely popular, especially when it comes to reading informational text.
There are many different techniques available in a speed reading program. They are all designed to help participants learn to read faster. Some naysayers, however, charge that some of these programs increase reading speed at the expense of comprehension. The speediest readers can plow through a couple thousand words in just an hour, as demonstrated in speed reading competitions. However, their rate of comprehension is only about fifty percent.
This is considered by some to be an essential component of a speed readng course that is lacking in many programs. They measure their success based solely on speed instead of comprehension and retention. This, of course, is very important, particularly in technical matters.
As you’re researching the various speed reading programs available, be sure to look for ones that are able to improve your retention and comprehension, not just your speed. As you start to use your new abilities, you’ll discover that it’s a lot faster to get what you need from any book or manual.
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