Rapid Reading Techniques
1. Raise your speed- comfort level.
How comfortable
are you speeding in a car? How fast do you have to go before you feel
you are “on the edge?” 70 MPH? 90? 120? How about 210 MPH, the speed
the Indy car drivers can average? Get the point?
the driver focuses all his or her skills on the track.
2. See the book as a mine full of ORE not GOLD.
Books
offer wonderful gold to the prospector. But the reader must sort
through tons of ore to find and refine the gold. The speed reader
changes mindsets: quits fooling around with the ore and searches for
the gold. What is a book anyway? What are words? They are “carriers” of
truth, thoughts, ideas, a thesis, information, terms, concepts,
notions
3. Quit Subvocalizing.
Most of us learned to read by
sounding out the words. The trouble is, most of us never stopped. Sure,
maybe we no longer audibly sound them out, or even move our lips, but
in our heads we are “reading to ourselves.
4. Use your finger.
For most beginning speed-readers
this is a shock. They remember reading in grade school with their
finger and assume it slows one down. Actually the finger is your pace
car.
It leads you forward at a speedy pace, and keeps you on focus and
avoiding back-skipping.
5. Break the Back-skip habit.
Most of us read along a
line of type like this one to get the interpretation of the meaning,
but as we read our eyes jump back to dwell on a word we just passed. We
do this without knowing it.
6. Use your peripheral vision.
Just like you must develop a
muscle in the gym, so your mind can be trained to use the eye-gate to
take in a broader amount of data.
Let your
mind drink in the information on the page without looking directly at
it — just like you “see” the sides of the road when driving an
automobile.
7. Learn to read KEY WORDS.
40-60% of the words on a
page are neither critical nor important. So, it stands to reason that if you
could figure out which are these KEY WORDS you could scan past the
other words and let your mind fill in the blank.
8. Eliminate “Bus Stops” (Eye rests).
As your eyes
read down this line they stop periodically and “rest” on a word.
9. Take breaks.
The research is clear. Steady reading
hour after hour is less efficient than taking a five minute break every
hour or less.
10. Set a time goal.
Have a 300 page book to read?
Decide how fast you’ll read it. push yourself,
concentrate, get yourself out there on the “racer’s edge”.
CAclubindia
