Speed Reading Program Sitemap

Foreword - More and more people today find they must do more and more reading. Professional men, businessmen, and work­ers who want to get ahead faster in industry are learning that the road to advancement leads through masses of printed words. Men and women everywhere feel the need to absorb a flood of new information in order to understand thought cur­rents moving through the world. They must read faster — and better.

Faster - To find your words-per-minute reading rate, take the total words in a selection you have just read and look for the number closest to this figure in the horizontal line at the top of the chart. Glance down this column till you reach the number opposite your reading time, as shown in the vertical column at the far left. This will be the approxi­mate number of words you read per minute

Faster Reading - You are about to have opened up to you a whole new world of reading pleasure. If reading has seemed difficult before, this book will show you how to make it almost effortless. I will tell you the skills by which rapid readers gain their speed, show you how to gain speed yourself. If you learn and practice the techniques and drills conscientiously your reading rate is bound to leap ahead. And as you read faster you will also read better.  The purpose of this book is to tell you how.

01.Pre-reading - Pre-reading applies entirely to nonfiction. It is not part of rapid reading as such, though it must be done quickly or its value as a timesaver is lost. It means simply that instead of beginning to read blindly you give a fast preliminary survey to every article, report, long business letter or nonfiction book to see what it is about and estimate its usefulness to you. If it has value, you go back and read the whole thing. But when a reader becomes skilled in this technique, pre-reading will often supply the gist of an entire article

02.Phrase Reading - The basic skill of rapid reading is learning to read in phrases. This simply means taking wider "visual bites" as your eyes move across a line of type. As I explained in the Introduc­tion, your eyes read words in a series of stops, or "fixations," jerking to the right after each stop to take in the next portion of the line.You read only when your eyes are stopped. The more words you can take in at each bite, the fewer stops will be necessary on each line and the faster you will read. By widening what is called your "span of recognition" you auto­matically increase your reading speed

03.Concentration - The effectiveness of every part of the Modern Reading technique is dependent on the ability to submerge yourself completely in the reading process. Concentration is the secret. You cannot read at your fastest speed and still get all the mean­ing unless you concentrate

04.Speed Drills - It is time now to introduce you to the drills which will put speed into your reading. You have learned about phrase reading and why it automatically increases your speed. I have told you that you cannot reach speed and comprehension unless you give full concentration while you read.

05.Skipping - These two timesavers, skipping and skimming, grow directly out of pre-reading, and we had better start by defining them. Skipping means simply that, on the basis of pre-reading, you jump over large sections of material. When you skim you cast your eyes down a page of type without actually reading but looking for significant phrases or important facts to stop you. You saw in pre-reading that you skipped a great deal but still got the main drift. As an efficient reader you will often skip passages — to save time and because these have nothing new.  You will often skim for facts or ideas.

06.Vocabulary - To read rapidly you must instantly recognize thousands of words. You have probably discovered already in doing some of the practice drills that failure to know a word puts a power brake on your speed. The only way to overcome this handicap is to add constantly to the reservoir of words at your command

07.Pacing - One popular misconception of rapid reading is that when a person learns to read at high speed he will race through everything at this accelerated pace. Don't believe it. No one expects you to read a scientific article filled with unfamiliar technical words, or a book of poems, at the same speed with which you properly gallop through a mystery novel.

Review - You have now been shown both the basic concepts and the steps to faster reading. When you start Part Two you are moving toward a higher plateau of enjoyment where you will learn to become a better reader as well as a faster one. But first I should like to give you a practice program to follow until you are confident that all the skills are working for you all the time. The Schedule of Drills puts you through a daily review of what you have been shown in Part One.

Read Better - ............

The Rewards - Faster heading, useful as it is with routine information material, is not an end in itself. It is only the gateway to better reading. The skills developed in Part One of this book are designed to overcome handicaps which keep most untrained readers from the pleasures of stretching their knowledge. In Part Two you move ahead to achieve the rewards of better reading.

Retention - The mind is a film which retains everything that is printed on it through sight and the other senses. Obviously, in read­ing, the images perceived most intensively are those the mind retains best. Some people say, "My mind is a sieve. Every­thing slips through it. I never can remember anything I read."

Vocabulary - Most authorities agree that the way to build a vocabu­lary systematically is to learn words in categories. This is how the experts work in those paperback books I mentioned in Chapter Six. The exercises are divided up according to groups of words centered in a single idea — the field of medicine, good and bad habits of people, words that grow out of various sciences, words about business and many more such categories. These books are efficient tools for increasing a vocabulary in a step-by-step manner — absorbing whole classes of words in the congenial atmosphere of related words.

Comprehension - Comprehension is simply applying intelligence and pre­vious knowledge to any new piece of writing you decide to read — and understanding it. Through the techniques of Modern Reading, comprehension will be improved and deepened, since these skills provide the means whereby the mind grasps ideas more quickly. But the quality of comprehension will always depend on what each individual brings to a new reading experi­ence from his background.

Critical Reading - Although one definition of criticism is "to censure," its larger meaning is an evaluation, a judgment. A rave review of a new book which contains no word of censure is just as much criticism as a review without a kind word to say. In both cases the critic is offering his own judgment, and of course you may not go along with him either way. The critical reader does not blindly accept opinions. He reads them for their own interest and reserves judgment till he gets hold of the book himself.

Part III Promise - And now we are ready to consider the Art of Reading. Everything that was said in the two preceding sections is only prologue to the goal toward which we have been working — the real art of reading. You have now prepared yourself to move with confidence into the wonderful world of books.

Art of Reading - ..............

Art of Reading - To practice the art of reading, develop a hungry, curious, questing mind and then seek your answers in books. . . You open doors when you open books . . . doors that swing wide to unlimited horizons of knowledge, wisdom and inspiration that will enlarge the dimensions of your life. . .

Wake Up - Question: Mrs. Newton P. Leonard, of Providence, R. I., President of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, was elected Rhode Island's "Mother of the Year" for 1955. Her question: "Is watching television an effective short cut to cul­ture and education?" This Week's Editors took her ques­tion to Dr. Frank C. Baxter, the professor of English literature who became one of television's leading stars.

Reading Plan - Mostof us have a Lifetime Savings Plan. We don't like to go along life's road with nothing in our pockets.

But how about going along it with nothing in our minds?

The man I pity most is the one who experiences this won­derful world, and leaves it without ever quite knowing what his life has been about. Whatever the state of his bank account, he lives and dies mentally bankrupt.

Family Reading - Some years ago, in This Week Magazine, I urged you to discover the joys of reading aloud. Since then such reading has flowered in a great revival. Theater readings have been very successful, recordings by poets like Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell reading their own works have been selling in large numbers. My own recording of Bible reading has been purchased by a gratifyingly large number of people.

Seen and Heard - Several decades ago it was common practice to have daughter Suzy play her latest piano selection for "company" and for son Tommy to recite "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in the parlor after dinner. Today in most quarters it is con­sidered bad taste — or worse, an outrageous bore — for chil­dren to perform. At adult gatherings youngsters are either banished completely, or remain to become perfect nuisances. A few are allowed to pass the hors d'oeuvres.

Better Jobs - Mr. Spencer is president of Science Research Associates. One of the activities of this Chicago-based organization is training students — and teachers — in the techniques of faster and better reading. In this article he explains the vital part reading plays in business advancement.

Reading Books - The pleasure of reading a good book is not passive, like the pleasure you get from a movie or a TV show. It is active. It involves you. It makes demands on your understanding and imagination.

Books are not a substitute for life. They are a part of life, like love and parenthood and doing one's chosen work in the world. A book that you enjoy becomes a part of you forever.

THE END

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