Learn How to Speed Read

Learn How to Effectively Double Your Reading Speed and Accelerate Your Learning Abilities to the Extreme!

Introduction to Speed Reading

We all learn to read at school, after a fashion. But for most of us, this is not an optimal use of our brain power. In this course you will learn to better use the left
brain's focused attention combined with the right brain's peripheral attention, in
close harmony. Good communication between the brain hemispheres is a prerequisite for creative thinking and also a sense of well-being, where thoughts and feelings are integrated.

As you probably expect, this course will also teach you to read much faster and at
the same time, to remember more of what you have read. These are obviously
great advantages.

There is another major benefit. Most of us, as we read, 'speak' the words in our heads. It is this subvocalisation that holds back fast reading and it is unnecessary.
It is possible to have an inner speech, a kind of 'thought awareness,' that isn't
linked to the tongue, mouth and vocal chord muscles, and this is much faster and
more fluent. Cutting out the identification of vocalisation and the stream of thought gives a surprising by-product. Many of us think that our constant subvocalised 'speaking voice' is who we are. Finding out that you can think and be aware without a vocal stream of words, opens up your consciousness to the usually unrecognised domain of intuition and spiritual awareness. You'll have a better sense of who you really are. Try it and see!

The Definition of Reading

Reading may be defined as an individual's total inter-relationship with symbolic information. Reading is a communication process requiring a series of skills. As such reading is a thinking process rather than an exercise in eye movements. Effective reading requires a logical sequence of thinking or thought patterns, and these thought patterns require practice to set them into the mind. They may be broken down into the following seven basic processes:

1. Recognition: the reader's knowledge of the alphabetic symbols.

2. Assimilation: the physical process of perception and scanning.

3. Intra-integration: basic understanding derived from the reading material itself, with minimum dependence on past experience, other than a knowledge of grammar and vocabulary.

4. Extra-integration: analysis, criticism, appreciation, selection & rejection. These are all activities which require the reader to bring his past experience to bear on the task.

5. Retention: this is the capacity to store the information in memory.

6. Recall: the ability to recover the information from memory storage.

7. Communication: this represents the application of the information and may be further broken down into at least 4 categories, which are:

* Written communication;
* Spoken communication;
* Communication through drawing and the manipulation of objects;
* Thinking, which is another word for communication with the self.

Many problems in reading and learning are due to old habits. Many people are still reading in the way that they were taught in elementary school. Their reading speed will have settled to about 250 w.p.m. Many people can think at rates of 500 w.p.m. or more, so their mind is running at twice the speed of their eyes. A consequence is that it is easy to lapse into boredom, day-dreaming or thinking about what you want to do on the weekend. Frequently, it is through this type of distraction that you find you have to re-read sentences and paragraphs, and you find as a result, ideas are difficult to understand and remember.

The basic problem - the mismatch between thinking speed and reading speed - arises for the most part from the inadequate methods by which reading is taught. Since the War there have been two main approaches: the Look-Say method and the Phonic method. Both methods are only semi-effective. In the Phonic method a child is first taught the alphabet, then the different sounds for each of the letters, then the blending of sounds and finally, the blending of sounds which form words. This method works best with children who are left-brain dominant.

In contrast, the Look- Say method works best with children who are right-brain dominant. It teaches a child to read by presenting him with cards on which there are pictures of objects, the names of which are printed clearly underneath. By using this method a basic vocabulary is built up, much in the manner of learning to read Chinese. When a child has built up enough basic vocabulary, he progresses through a series of graded books similar to those for the child taught by the Phonic method, and eventually becomes a silent reader. In neither of the above cases is a child taught how to read quickly and with maximum comprehension and recall. An effective reader has usually discovered these techniques all by himself.

Neither the Look-Say method nor the Phonic method, either in isolation or in combination, are adequate for teaching an individual to read in the complete sense of the word. Both these methods are designed to cover the first stage of reading, the stage of recognition, with some attempt at assimilation and intraintegration, but children are given little help on how to comprehend and integrate the material properly, nor on how to ensure it is remembered. The methods currently used in schools do not touch on the problems of speed, retention, recall, selection, rejection, concentration and note taking, and indeed all those skills which can be described as advanced reading techniques.

In short, most of your reading problems have not been dealt with during your initial education. By using appropriate techniques, the limitations of early education can be overcome and reading ability improved by 500% or more. For example, skipping back over words can be eliminated as 90% of back-skipping is unnecessary for understanding. The 10% of words that do need to be reconsidered are probably words which need to be looked up in a dictionary and clearly defined.

GOLDEN RULE: When studying this course, and indeed, whenever reading passages that you want to understand and make use of, make sure never to pass by a word or concept that you do not understand. If you do pass by a misunderstood word or concept, the rest of the text will probably become incomprehensible, and you will feel distracted and bored. If it's worth reading at all, then you owe it to yourself to define any word you're not sure of, or find the misunderstood word(s) in the concept that is unclear and sort that out before going further. If your studies bog down, go back to where you were doing well, clear up your understanding and start off again from that point.

Techniques in this course will reduce the time for each fixation (the assimilation of a group of words simultaneously) to less than a quarter of a second, and the size of fixation can be increased from one or two short words to as many as five words or half a line. Your eyes will be doing less physical work; rather than having as many as 500 tightly focused fixations per page, you will be making about 100, each of which is less fatiguing, and reading speed will exceed 1,000. w.p.m. on light material.

(The above article is the introduction of the eBook: "Speed Reading Monster Course". Click here to learn more.

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