Online StoreSpeed Reading - Teach Yourself a New Way to Read
With a speed reading program, people learn to rapidly scan the reading material. They are taught to ignore irrelevant information and pick out only the pertinent parts. The idea is to be able to gather the essence of the material through reading entire sentences or phrases as a block, instead of just individual words.
In particular, technical materials can be difficult to read, and they often run to a thousand pages or more. Speed reading can help people get through them faster while retaining the important information. 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. And they repeat this with the following word. And as they get older, they continue to use this rather inefficient way of reading. But a speed reading program can retrain the brain to learn a better, faster way to read.
The first speed reading program was developed and introduced in Australia by Evelyn Wood in 1958. In the years that followed, speed reading has taken on ever more popularity, in particular the ability to absorb lots of information.
It’s possible to find a variety of techniques when looking for a speed reading program. 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.
If you’re looking to find a good speed reading program, make sure it promises to help your understanding and ability to retain the material and not just teach you to read faster. 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.
