Hi fellow readers! Hope you are well and reading a lot!
I am here for getting some insights about 'Speed Reading' from you guys. Being a painfully slow reader, I was amazed to learn about speed reading. What else could I do as there are thousands of good books those are left to read and more are published each year. So many books but so little time!
I was hopeful getting to know about the speed reading technique. I bought The Speed Reading Book by Tony Buzan who is a pioneer in this field. I am halfway through the book.
I have learnt about my reading habit and speed, the history and development of speed reading, current world record holders (although the book was first published in 1971 and the edition I have was last revised in 2000, so not so current, right?).
The top of the list was attained by Sean Adam, who could read 3,850 wpm(words per minute)! After a google search, I came to know that current Guinness World Record holder of speed reading is Howard Stephen Berg who is also from the USA. But he can read at the speed of 25,000 wpm! Unimaginable! Right? Well, advancing in the book I come across the stories of Antonio di Marco Magliabechi and Eugenia Alexeyenko. The formar one ccould recall any text even with all the punctuation marks and the latter had the speed of 416,250wpm thus they could read any book with superhuman speed and a higher degree of comprehension!
The techniques include to stop subvocalization (which I did and still do unconsiously), clustering 2/3/4 words together, using a guide to prevent re read. All these were managable by me. My reading speed is around 150-200wpm which is not so good. Maybe English not being my native language can be a reason, but even in my mother tongue, the speed remains almost the same! I have taken the tests from the book also tested from other places. The analysis shows my reading speed has increased about 100wpm but the comprehension varies irregularly.
Till these, it was alright for me at least I could follow, also from the chart, you can see I am getting better by following the rules. Things get out of my control from there. As the author mentioned about using peripheral vision I cannot get my mind and eyes to cooperate on this. I am anxious what to come next! The meta guiding techniques also amazes me.
I cannot understand how one can read a full page at a glance! Even if not considering the extreme situation, how can one read using the meta-guiding techniques! Well, these are my queries, if there are speed reader here, can you help me understand how peripheral vision works and how can one read a page with minimum fixation point?
The author mentioned it is relatively easy to achieve 1500wpm with training and using good habits. Do you guys have that kind of speed? How do you read?
Is speed reading necessary? Does it work best with non-fiction reading or with fictions also? I think fictions are not to be speed read as there are emotions in all the words!
May be I will write about the latter half of the book after I have finished it. Till then it is time for me to say goodbye!
Happy Reading!