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Anyone take a speed reading course?

A

Aquaman

Lifer
Anyone take a speed reading course?

I am thinking of taking a speed reading course at night school but I want to get an impression from someone that has taken it before.

Cheers,
Aquaman
 
It involves learning to read sentences and paragraphs in "blocks" rather than individual words. The infomercial ones are crap, though. They just tell you to read the book, but the book is b.s and by the time your done reading it (unless you can speed read aleady 😉) the company has already packed up shop.
 
The course I am looking at does not claim super super speed reading but they claim to triple your reading speed.

Cheers,
Aquaman
 
I got the mega speed reading infomercial thing because I had to read so much in high school.

Basically, just practice reading chunks of words at a time. After awhile you can read a chunk of words very quickly, much the same way that you read a chunk of letters as a word. There you go, I just saved you 70 bucks.

It did help me, and the 70 bucks was probably worth it for the time saved over the past decade or so.
 
They simply train you to scan through and pick up keywords in the text.

The hard part is learning to comprehend what you read in that short time.

The bad thing is that speed reading does not make leisure reading enjoyable, so there is really no point to it unless your job requires that you read a bunch of stupid stuff all day long or something.
 
I bought a book on it and tried it but I could not get my level of comprehension to the same level it was when reading normally. So...I never pursued it further.
 
Originally posted by: Aquaman
Originally posted by: Jnetty99
How does that work?
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I don't know....... that is why I am asking 😉

Cheers,
Aquaman
Click to expand...
Basically, you learn to greatly improve your ability to remember what you read. They usually have you read the first sentence in every paragraph. This gives you an idea what the paragraph is about. Then you do comprehension tests as well as speed tests.

I was up to about 200 words per minute or something like that, with 100% comprehension.

A newspaper article took maybe 20 secs or less to read.

 
My dad bought me some speed reading computer programs and I got pretty good at speed reading. When I really want to speed read my brain skips over insignificant words like "the" , "an" , "a" and others and just picks up nouns and verbs to make simple verb phrases in my head. Thus I can tell what is going on in the passage while ignoring more insignificant words. You have to be careful to not miss negating words like "no" and "not" otherwise what you interpreted could be completely wrong! I remember the speed reading games the best. One was to accelerate recogntion of objects so what it did was flash a single pie graph looking circle with different colored segments and it asked you to match it to one of 4 statically displayed pie charts. Now that was fun!
 
Originally posted by: archcommus
I just can't picture understanding complicated stuff like textbooks well enough by speed reading them.
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You can't.
Speed reading is not magical, it just accelerates reading at the cost of comprehension.
 
Originally posted by: archcommus
I bought a book on it and tried it but I could not get my comprehendibility to the same level it was when reading normally. So...I never pursued it further.
Click to expand...
Perhaps there were other issues involved 😛
 
BUY this book on amazon:

Breakthrough Rapid Reading

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de...9282-6832766?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

I have it, and it is very useful. It has more info and is much cheaper than any class. It is the best reviewed on Amazon. The author recommends about an hour a day for 6 weeks for significant results. Although, after a week, you'll be reading faster. Basically, it trains your eyes to recognize groups of words instantly, instead of one word at a time. It is like looking at a word. You don't look at each letter, you just "know" the word when you see it. Now, imagine just "knowing" four or five groups of words in one glance. That is how you speed read. Another aspect is subvocalization. Many people "hear" a voice in their head when they read (some people actually move their vocal chords.) This slows you down alot. The practice lessons will eliminate this. Many other techniques are presented that build on one another. After alot of practice, its a very nice skill to have. I doubt it would help with advanced textbooks or scientific journals, but it will with the newspaper, standard magazines, and most novels.
 
My english teacher used to speedread books, but she said it destroyed the point of enjoying the actual stories.
 
Originally posted by: Mermaidman
Originally posted by: archcommus
I bought a book on it and tried it but I could not get my comprehendibility to the same level it was when reading normally. So...I never pursued it further.
Click to expand...
Perhaps there were other issues involved 😛
Click to expand...
Yeah I knew that sounded wrong. 😛

Level of comprehension...there!

 
Originally posted by: bootymac
My english teacher used to speedread books, but she said it destroyed the point of enjoying the actual stories.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's be my gripe with it. I remember a guest speaker at my school trying to promote speed reading. She inferred that speed reading provided more pleasure since you could read three times as many books in the same amount of time. Pfft. You lose the magic of immersing yourself in the adventure if you do that.
 
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