Speed Reading

In my adult life, I have found reading to be one of life’s simple pleasures.  Sadly, there is always waaay more things to read then time to do.  And, I like to learn how to do things better.  So speed reading has been an interest for quite some time.  I once attended a free intro seminar and later bought some training software.  But I couldn’t say I got anywhere with it.  A couple of weeks ago, one of the ‘deal-per-day’ coupon sites offered a substantial discount on a course, so I jumped at the opportunity.

The one course was put on by Iris Reading.  The key insight was to see the forest, and not get caught up in the trees.  The course was not exactly what I thought it was going to be.  But I felt that I walked away from the course with everything that I need to become a more efficient reader.

There seemed to be two themes of the course: tactics and techniques.  I was really expecting the course to be more about tactics: How to read an article quicker.  Here, there wasn’t too much new.  Don’t read one word at a time.  Don’t regress on a sentence.  Don’t verbalize the words in your head.  Do use your fingers to scroll along the words you read.  I guess since I had some exposure to speed reading, it shouldn’t be surprising that I knew what to do.  There is no magic pill; I just have to practice until I get better at it.  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I started the course reading at an above average pace.  During the class, I had a 33% improvement in speed.  If I keep at it, doubling my original speed is feasible.  And the instructor gave us some drills to work on on our own.

What I did not expect was that half of the class was on techniques for reading more efficiently.  This is where the ‘see the forest’ insight came into play.  Have you ever found yourself reading something and lost interest or found the subsequent material irrelevant, but kept reading just to finish it?  Stop!  You don’t care so you and not gaining anything from it.  And how can you possibly read quicker than ending immediately?  Likewise, the instructor gave us a series of techniques for overviewing material, identifying useless sections, and knowing when to quit.

One technique the instructor challenged us to utilize was to read the first and last paragraph of all sections of a nonfiction book that we’ve wanted to read, but haven’t been able to get around to.  Sure we’ll read less than 20% of the book, but we’ll probably walk away with a gist of 80% of the material.  And that’s definitely better than waiting for that ‘someday’ to come when you’ll actually read it.  I’ve found 17 books at home that I plan to try this on.  Armed with these new skills, maybe I’ll actually manage to cover everything I want to read!  Ok, maybe not.  But definitely more!

Links
Iris Reading: http://www.irisreading.com/