speed-reading-kam-knight

Speed Reading

Learn to read a 200+ page book in 1 hour.

See Speed Reading for surveys on similar books.

Total time: 6 hours and 16 minutes.

Pre-Reading

Purpose

Define your purpose

With purpose, the focus of the mind changes and its awareness opens, often without you realizing.

• What can I get out of this material?
• How will reading it help me?
• What would you like the material to answer?

Preview

Why we need preview

One reason is that the mind doesn’t necessarily respond to what is happening in real-time, but to what it think is going to happen. In other words, the mind is constantly making predictions about the future.

Preview helps the mind make more accurate predictions.

THIEVES recommended by the National Council of Teacher of English

(NCTE)

• Title
• Headings
• Introduction
• Every word in bold, underline, quote, and italics
• Visual aids
• End of Chapter Questions
• Summary/Conclusion

Styles

Reading styles subject to change

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested — Francis Bacon

Ask yourself the following questions

• What am I trying to gain from the material?
• How long will the information be relevant?
• How difficult is the material to read and comprehend?

Adjust your speed from books to books and from pages to pages.

Speed Reading Techniques

Space Reading

Look at the space

Avoid looking at the words you are reading, but rather at the spaces in between the words.

This is the essence of speed reading, grabbling text as a whole instead of in individual parts.

• As you progress, make sure to work on expanding peripheral vision.
• When you’re familiar with this technique, try looking at the space between every two/three/four words.

Chunking

Read phrases

The key to this technique is not to grab words at random but to grab combinations that form a phrase. A phrase is two or more words that form a meaningful unit in a sentence.

Space or phrase

When reading, you will either look at spaces or at chunks of words, but not both.

Subvocalization Avoiding

Side-effects of subvocalization

• Research shows that fast readers exhibit lower activation in regions of the brain associated with speech, suggesting higher speeds correlate to fewer phonological processes like vocalization.
• Vocalizing words forces the mind to read slower than its potential.
• Higher change of getting bored — as we tend to subvocalize in a monotone, expressionless manner.

Silence is gold

Simply silencing the inner narrator can double or triple reading speed right here and right now.

Techniques to avoid subvocalization

• Close mouth
• Read faster than speech
• Hum something
• Listen to music (without lyrics)

Enhancing Techniques

Avoid Fixation

See forests from trees

Think of English words as Chinese characters. Reading each single letter does not make sense, neither does reading single strokes.

Fixation impairs both speed and comprehension.

Tips to avoid fixation

• Reduce number of fixations — either by Space Reading or chunking.
• Reduce length of fixation — don’t slow down to contemplate the text, keep moving.

Avoid Regression

Reading speed regresses

Studies show that people spend as much as one third of their time rereading what they’ve already read.

Regression breaks flow and speed reading is all about flow.

Techniques to avoid regression

• Have a clear purpose.
• Stop subvocalizing.
• Index card — to block the read content.
• Control fixation — don’t be erratic and impulsive with the jumps and stops.

Visual Range

Peripheral vision is powerful

The brain processes information from the sides 25 percent faster than it does from direct vision, which is why the brain is able to react to dangers so quickly.

Exercises to expand your peripheral vision.

Sticks and Straw Place a straw horizontally on the desk and look at its

center. At the same time, try insert tooth-sticks into the two ends of the straw simultaneously.

Off the Wall Stare at a spot on the wall. Throw a ball onto that spot

with one hand and catch it with another. Use your peripheral vision for both tossing and catching. Or, throw the ball directly from one hand to another.

Open Your Awareness

Stare at an object, then gradually begin to notice things to your right or left.

Shultz Table Stare at the center of an x by x table, try to recognize

all the letters/digits in the it with your peripheral vision. Draw such tables on your own or generate using a tool.

Raining Letters Similar to Shultz table, stare at the letters in the

center column and try recognize the ones in the other columns.

Centered Text Stare at the middle of each line, try to make out the

words on the side of it using peripheral vision.

Improving Comprehension

• Focus on ideas and main points.
• Identify the topic sentence in each paragraph.
  • Often the first sentence.
  • Tend to be short and general, with limited content.
  • Often poses a question to be answered.
  • Often contains word or two that repeat in the rest of the paragraph.
  • Often contain transition words.
  • Topic sentence following transition sentence.
• Build a strong vocabulary
  • Circle unfamiliar words and look up.
  • Use a thesaurus in addition to dictionary
  • Read a variety of materials
  • Listen to audiobooks — apparently not for ESL speakers
  • Learn prefixes and suffixes
  • Talk to people with strong vocabulary
  • Study words

Additional Tips

• Recall and review (retrieval practice)
  • When return from breaks
  • At the end of a chapter/book

Train your mind to remember

If the mind knows that it will be called upon to remember a passage, it will work harder to remember it.

• Visualize

  • It helps you engage with the material.
  • Visualization enhances memory.
  • Visualization aids comprehension.

• Eye exercises

  • Fix your head, try look the the right and left.
  • Smoothly rotate your eye to see the four directions
  • Looking straight ahead, make figure-8 motions with the eyes.
  • Looking straight a head, make plus sign motions with the eyes.
  • Open your eyes and mouth as wide as possible, then squeeze them shut as tightly as possible.
  • Eye blinking, hold your eyes closed for half a second each time.
  • Eye massage.
  • Eye breaks — Staring at distant objects for from 20 seconds to 2 minutes

Quotes

Purposes matter The two most important days in your life are the day

you are born and the day you find out why. — Mark Twain

Ideas matter

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Words matter As vocabulary is reduced, so are the number of feelings

that you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify — Sheri S. Tepper