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Speed Reading For Dummies
Author:
Published:
August 3, 2009
Overview
Learn to:
- Increase your reading speed and comprehension
- Use speed techniques for any type of reading material
- Improve your silent reading skills
- Recall more of what you read
The fun and easy way® to become a more efficient, effective reader!
Want to read faster and recall more of what you read? This practical, hands-on guide gives you the techniques you need to increase your reading speed and retention, whether you're reading books, e-mails, magazines, or even technical journals! You'll find reading aids and plenty of exercises to help you read faster and better comprehend the text.
- Yes, you can speed read discover the skills you need to read quickly and effectively, break your bad reading habits, and take in more text at a glance
- Focus on the fundamentals widen your vision span and see how to increase your comprehension,
retention, and recall
Open the book and find:
- Tried-and-true techniques from The Reader's Edge® program
- How to assess your current reading level
- Tools and exercises to improve your reading skills
- Speed-reading fundamentals you must know
- Helpful lists of prefixes, suffixes, roots, and prime words
- A speed-reading progress worksheet
- Exercises for eye health and expanded reading vision
- Tips for making your speed-reading skills permanent
You can use speed reading to enhance both your reading ability and your reading enjoyment. Some misconceptions about the speed reading method persist — pay no attention to them. By making slight adjustments to your reading habits, especially stopping yourself from hearing or saying each word, you can move from being an average reader with average comprehension to a proficient speed-reader with excellent comprehension.
About The Author
Richard Sutz is the founder and CEO of The Literacy Company, developers of The Reader's Edge® speed-reading program. Sutz's program teaches silent reading fluency for effective and efficient speed reading. Peter Weverka is the author of many For Dummies books. His articles and stories have appeared in Harper's, SPY, and other magazines
Articles From The Book
3 results
Reading
Articles
To become a fluent speed reader, you must break the habit of vocalizing, or hearing individual words in your head as you read. How you break the vocalization habit depends on how much you vocalize when you read. Try the following test to determine how much you vocalize.
Read this paragraph to yourself, not aloud.
Reading
Articles
You may have some preconceived ideas about what speed reading is. Don't worry, many people have erroneous ideas about the practice of speed reading, including the myths in the following list, all of which are false:
You don't enjoy reading as much when you speed read. On the contrary! Speed reading is efficient reading.
Reading
Articles
Speed reading isn't a whole different way of reading; it's just a more focused way of reading. Reading engages the eyes, ears, mouth, and, of course, the brain. Speed reading engages these senses even more than normal reading because you use your senses and brain power even more efficiently.
Speed reading is
Seeing: The first step in reading anything is seeing the words.
Reading
Articles
Eye movement is controlled by muscles in your eye sockets and eyeballs, and like the rest of your muscles, you can strengthen them through exercise. Eye strength comes in handy for speed reading, which taxes your eyes more than regular reading because it requires your eyes to cover more distance on the page. Making your eye muscles stronger and more flexible improves your clarity of vision and retards the natural eyesight deterioration that occurs with aging.
Reading
Articles
Speed reading up to 16 words at a glance is possible because when you read most words, you don’t see the letters in the words or the words per se. What you see on the page are shapes or images that you recognize from your past reading experience — that is, the words are in your vocabulary.
The only time you actually see a word and examine all its letters is the first few times you encounter it.
Reading
Articles
Skimming — getting the essence from reading material without reading all the words — boils down to knowing what parts to read and what parts to pass by. Following are some tips and techniques for recognizing what is important to read in the act of skimming.
Know what you want
Before you start skimming, ask yourself what you want to get from the book or article under your nose.
Reading
Articles
Stopping yourself from vocalizing is an essential first step to becoming a speed reader. Vocalizing is hearing words as you read — you may even move your lips and quietly pronounce each word. If you're saying or hearing every word, you're reading at the speed you talk, not at the speed you think. Use these tips to kick your vocalization habit to the curb:
Read for meaning rather than sound.
Reading
Articles
Going straight to the main idea of each paragraph significantly increases your reading speed. This main idea is the paragraph's topic sentence. You don’t have to read as much to get a firmer grasp of the author’s fundamental ideas if you can find and understand a paragraph's topic sentence. The question is: How do you recognize the main idea in a paragraph amid all the details?
Reading
Articles
Think of scanning as a hyperactive form of skimming, which is in a turn a quicker form of speed reading. You speed through the text in search of information without any regard for the overall gist of the author’s ideas. All you want is information about a specific topic — George Washington, the influenza virus, copper production in 19th-century Peru, ancient Greek sandal sizes, or whatever.
Reading
Articles
If you're challenging yourself to become a speed reader, you may be curious to know how you compare to others in the speed-reading department. (And who wouldn't be?) Roughly speaking, readers fall into these categories where speed is concerned:
1 to 200 WPM (words per minute): You're a talker. You read one word at a time at about the same speed as you talk and you may move your lips when you read.
Reading
Articles
Speed reading is a good way to absorb a lot of printed information quickly, but sometimes you just need to get the gist of what is being written about, without all the details. That's when knowing how to skim text can be helpful.
When you skim a page, you take the main ideas from the reading material without reading all the words.
Reading
Articles
You can use speed reading to enhance both your reading ability and your reading enjoyment. Some misconceptions about the speed reading method persist — pay no attention to them. By making slight adjustments to your reading habits, especially stopping yourself from hearing or saying each word, you can move from being an average reader with average comprehension to a proficient speed-reader with excellent comprehension.
Reading
Articles
For your eyes to see anything, they have to be still. You can’t swing your eyes wildly around the room and expect to see anything but a blur. The same is true of reading words on a page. To see words, your eyes must be still, but they must also move left-to-right across the page to take in words in the act of reading.
Reading
Articles
The following speed reading test establishes your starting rate so you can see how fast a reader you are and how much you improve in the course of your speed-reading studies. For this test, read without adopting any speed-reading principles you may have already read about; read as though you don’t know anything about speed reading.
Reading
Articles
Reading in clumps means taking in more than one word at a time while you read, and it's essential for speed reading. A clump is a collection of 4 to 16 adjacent words that you read in a single glance. When you read in clumps, you naturally increase your speed because you can’t slow down to vocalize (speak or hear the words as you read them).
Reading
Articles
A major component of speed reading is eye fixation, a point where your eyes come to rest as you read. Readers who make fewer eye fixations read faster because they take in more words with each fixation. The number of words you can process in an eye fixation depends on your vision span, your vocabulary, and your familiarity with what you’re reading.
Reading
Articles
The larger your vocabulary is, the faster you can read because you don’t stumble as often on words you don’t know or recognize. When you read words that you’re already familiar with, you read beyond the words for their meanings. In the act of reading, you absorb ideas, thoughts, feelings, and descriptions — not individual words.
Reading
Articles
The larger your vocabulary is, the faster you can read because you don’t stumble as often on words you don’t know or recognize. When you read words that you’re already familiar with, you read beyond the words for their meanings. In the act of reading, you absorb ideas, thoughts, feelings, and descriptions — not individual words.
Reading
Articles
Reading educators use the term vocalization to describe readers who hear words when they read. Vocalizers are readers who read with their mouths — they say and hear the words as they read. Vocalizing slows your reading down considerably and is a habit you should break if you intend to become a speed reader.
Do you vocalize?
Reading
Articles
Reading engages the eyes, ears, mouth, and brain. Speed reading engages these senses even more than normal reading because you use your senses and brain power even more efficiently. The following sections what goes on in your eyes, ears, mouth, and brain when you speed read.
Speed reading is seeing
The first step in reading anything is seeing the words.