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Thursday

Faster And Better Reading



Reading is fun. Reading is work. Reading is easy. Reading is hard. I love to read. I hate to read. I would read more if I could read faster, but it takes me forever to finish a book.
These are some of the attitudes that people have about reading. Does one of them fit you? The way we feel about reading depends a great deal on the way we were taught to read and the skills we have developed on our own. Most of us would like to be able to read faster and to retain more information from our reading. Of course, we might want to read in a leisurely manner sometimes. But it would be a definite advantage to be able to read rapidly when we need to get information in a hurry. Maybe you
have a lengthy business report to read, or a book you must finish before the end of the week.





READING ROADBLOCKS
One of the major reasons for slow reading habits is the way we were taught to read--word by word. Of course that is necessary when learning to read for the first time, but reading word by word will be at about the same rate as your speaking speed.
Look at a word near the middle of a line of print. Without moving the focus point of your eyes, you should be able to see one or two words, maybe more, on each side of the word you are looking at. So it isn't necessary
to look at each word individually. By looking at two or three points on a line of print, you can read the entire line. You might even be able to read a whole line with just one "look" (also called "eye fixation"). This
is very important, because it takes time to move your eyes from one point to another and focus them on the new position.
When you look at the first and last words of a line, you are wasting about half of your eye span reading blank space in the margin. You won't usually find anything of great interest there! So begin a line by looking
at the second, third, or fourth word, and when you get about that far from the end, go to the next line.
Another obstacle to efficient reading is regressing--looking back at something you have already read, because you didn't get it the first time.
This often happens because your attention was wandering. Your mind can take in thoughts at the rate of several hundred or thousand words per minute. (The picture "experiment" in one of the exercises should convince
you of this.) So it is easy to see why your attention would wander if you
are reading just a couple of hundred words per minute. Your mind is just loafing most of the time, so it strays off to other things!
Some people move their lips as they read--again, because that's how we learned to read. If we didn't read aloud, the teacher couldn't know if we were getting it right! And even without moving the lips, sometimes we move
other parts of the speaking apparatus: the tongue or the vocal chords. If you are moving your lips or any other part of your speaking machinery, you are obviously reading word by word.

STRATEGY FOR STUDYING
It may be that a great deal of your reading time is devoted to study-type reading. This may be in connection with courses in a school or college, or it may be study related to your job or a hobby. Maybe you are doing a kind of work that didn't even exist when you were in school, or perhaps your interests have extended to subjects that you didn't study in school.
The ability to read efficiently makes it easy to continue learning throughout a lifetime. Of course education doesn't end upon graduation from high school or college.
To make study time more productive, here are some suggestions for studying a chapter or a portion of a chapter in a book. Some of these remarks will apply to a textbook or similar book that is designed specifically for teaching, with chapter summaries, review questions, etc., but the principles apply to any book which you read to learn something.
1. First, become familiar with the book as a whole. Look at the Table of Contents and the Index. See if there are appendices; if so, what kind of information do they contain? Is there a glossary, a list of terms with special meanings, etc.? Sometimes there will be separate Tables of Contents listing maps, charts, or illustrations.
Knowing about these sources can be helpful when you need to find some particular information in a hurry.
2. The rest of these suggestions are for studying a chapter or section. Begin by looking quickly through the chapter to get a
general idea of what it contains. Notice subheadings, charts or other illustrations, and end-of-chapter material (questions, etc.).
This survey should take just a few seconds, maybe a minute.
3. Now we will do things backwards. Look at the end-of-chapter material. Is there a chapter summary? (It may be at the beginning
instead of the end.) If there is a summary in either place, read it. This will give you an idea of the main points that you should
know when you have finished the reading.
4. If there are questions at the end of the chapter, read them. As you read the chapter, you should find the answers to the questions,
or at least information from which you can figure out the answers.
5. Now comes the speed reading. Read through the chapter as fast as you can, being alert for the answers to the questions you read
earlier. Don't stop to ponder over things that you don't understand; you might mark them with your pencil so that you will
be sure to study them more thoroughly later.
6. After the speed reading of step 5, you should have a fairly good idea of what the chapter is about. Now read the chapter again.
Use a dictionary or the glossary, if there is one, to find the meanings of unfamiliar words. Use the index to find further
explanations, elsewhere in the book, of points that are not clear.
If there are still parts of the chapter that you don't understand,
make notes in the margin so that you will remember to look elsewhere for more information. Later you can ask your teacher, if this is a book for a class in which you are enrolled. Ask a
colleague, if it pertains to your work. Look for information in other books.
7. Now speed-read the chapter again to tie it all together. Answer the questions at the end of the chapter. Look over the chapter
summary again to be sure that everything mentioned in the summary is now familiar to you.
This might seem like a lot of work--maybe more time than you are accustomed to spending--but the goal is to get the most from your study. If you can read it the "old" way in less time, but don't understand the material after you read it, the "less time" required is not really saved time. And with some practice you might learn to do this really thorough study even more quickly than the "old" way of just plowing through the chapter one time, hoping to pick up something.
One thing accomplished by the technique described above is to make your reading active rather than passive. After your initial survey of the material, you will be looking for certain things as you read--answers to the questions, points mentioned in the summary, etc. This will help you to concentrate with less mind-wandering, and will help you to remember what you read.

CHANGING GEARS
It is probably obvious that you won't try to read all material at the same speed. At times you might just need to find a word or phrase. To do
this, you will "skim" through the text without paying attention to the meaning--you are just looking for a certain pattern of letters. If you are trying to master difficult ideas, you might need to read word by word and think of each individual word. See step 6 above. Even in this case, a rapid reading of the context (the part before and after your point of concentration) can help understanding.
If you are reading poetry or some other kinds of literature, you will want to give attention to the sounds of words. You might even read aloud. We are interested in speed reading not as an end in itself, but as a technique to help get the most pleasure and learning from the time that we
spend reading.

OTHER RESOURCES
There are several books available on the subject of speed reading. One that I have used in classroom teaching is "Faster Reading Self-Taught" by Shefter, published by Pocket Books. I recommend it for its presentation of reading techniques and for the many reading exercises it contains.

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