Forum Moderators: open
Thus I really want to learn how to speed read. However I really dont want to take a course or anything.
I was wondering if anyone came accross any sort of free resources which could help me learn. I did a google search but found only individual articles.
First point, pay attention to titles and headers. It seems obvious but that will give you an idea of what to expect.
Second point is about eye movement. Take this line for example:
word1 word2 word3 word4 word5 word6 word7 word8 word9
It's a short line of 9 words. Try "reading" it but not word-by-word. Look at word3, then word5, then word8. You can see the other words in peripheral vision.
Try reading something out of book with that method, three "stops" per line. You don't have to count the words exactly -- just make your eyes pause in the general position.
As you get better at it, you can upgrade from 3 stops per line, to 2.
Anyway, that's the way I remember it. I'm sure there are advanced techniques as well as better explanations but that's some of it in a nutshell.
Improve your vocab. That way, from the context of the sentence you can grasp its meaning without having to read the whole line
Practice, practice!
Strange tips, but they work for me!
The downside is that an 800 page book lasts around one evening ..and even coming back to it after 30 years can remember all the story / dialogue / info etc ..sometimes even just looking at the cover or hearing the title makes it not worth picking up the book as the contents come flooding back ....
So ...great you say!...
Uh Uh ...I have a 40' trailor of books stored ( at the other end of the country 1000 miles away ) at the moment since our last move ( another came with us )...I have sold off at least 5 times this many during my life because they were read and therefore no longer needed ....
The money spent and then only partially recuperated in this way is phenomenal ( enough to buy a couple of decent houses ) ...even pristine condition books ( I beleive it is a sin to damage a book ) have low resale value ...
the savior for "bookaholics" is the internet ....
the local lending library took me just 5 months to do ..
learning speed reading ( if your memory is good for what you read ) is like trying crack ....
( then again it is very usefull on these BB's :)
Now if only I could type at 10% of the speed ( and on this "bassackwards" azerty keyboard too ...:)
[edited by: Leosghost at 10:06 am (utc) on Sep. 10, 2004]
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg THE PAOMNNEHAL PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
My girlfriend is in her last year of her Master's Degree (child development, with a focus on literacy). She has always told me that dyslexia is not a case of children seeing the letters in the wrong order, it's caused by something deeper neurologically. That statement proves that to be true.
[snopes.com...]
See especially
[mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk...]
Still a neat trick though.
Tim