Review of Part One

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.

If you are like most people, you do not use the techniques naturally as yet. You have to remind yourself whenever you pick up a newspaper, a book or a magazine to put the skills into practice. After a while, they should become an instinctive and almost unconscious part of your reading attitude. But this will happen only if you practice regularly. The important thing is to establish a routine whereby you make certain that you use the seven steps to faster reading each day. It is not necessary to make a study period of this. You will absorb the method most naturally if you apply the techniques in the course of a normal day's reading. The Schedule of Drills is simply a handy checklist to make sure you are doing them all. Here it is:

Schedule of Drills

1. Pre-reading (Chapter One). Pre-read an article. Whether you read it thoroughly afterward is unimportant.  What is im portant in this exercise is to make the decision:  "I should read it," or, '"I don't need to."  Pre-reading trains you to make up your mind quickly whether to  spend time reading further. Always pre-read as fast as you  can, following the method explained in Chapter One.
   
   
2. Phrase reading (Chapter Two). Several important drills help you to read in phrases: a. Work at widening your span of recognition by trying to increase the number of words you see at each fixation. Practicing the "eye-swing" exercise (page 30) will quicken this skill,   h. Train yourself not to look at the extreme left of a line but at the second word. This gives a lead in cutting down fixations.  Lifting your eyes before the end of the line has the same effect,  c. Circling units of meaning in newspaper articles will help you become conscious of phrases and so let your mind absorb ideas faster,  d. Separating units of meaning with a pencil/ by diagonal bars/ like this/ is less clumsy/. You will/ find this/ is good drill/ for comprehension too/, e. Fixing your eyes just above a line of type as you read helps make phrases stand out.
   
   
3. Concentration (Chapter Three).  This is something you can practice anywhere, and your own will power is the key. You must fight against letting distracting noises interfere with your absorption in reading; you must force your emotional problems into the background.   It requires intelligence and
   persistence to achieve concentration.  But it must be done if you   are   to   read   rapidly   with   full   comprehension.   With continued practice  you  should find that your reading becomes more important than what is going on around you.
   
   
4. Speed Drills (Chapter Four). Each of the drills described in Chapter Four should be practiced daily.   Here they are: a. Columnar reading:   Fix your eyes on the center of a newspaper column, draw them down the column rapidly, trying to see as many words as possible on both sides,   h. Stretch your speed by drawing a Pacing Card down the pages of a book a little faster than you can comfortably read.   Put aside the Pacing Card and go on reading at the same speed, c. To quicken perception,  use the flash-card technique on columns of phrases and digits.   (See Chapter Four for details.)
   
   
5. Skipping and skimming (Chapter Five). To practice skipping, read an article rapidly, trying to get the author's main points, but skipping long explanations and what seems irrelevant. Then read the article thoroughly and see how much you missed that was really important.   For efficient skimming you must know in advance what you are looking for — facts, dates, significant phrases, details of a certain sort.   By pre-reading any article you know what you may expect to find.  Set your purpose and start skimming. If you have an encyclopedia, this provides excellent drill.  Pick out the name of any person. Decide on half-a-dozen facts to find — dates of his birth and death and place of each.  The maiden name of his wife, where he lived most of his life, the principal distinction he reached. Now lay a pencil vertically down the center of the column and skim, swinging your eyes from left to right and back.
   
   
6. Vocabulary Building (Chapter Six). Add at least eight or ten words each day to your notebook of unfamiliar words. Upgrade words in your reserve and passive vocabularies and use them in conversation.   Look up all words you are not sure of in the dictionary, write down definitions and make sentences using each one.  Above all things, study the pronunciation ofunfamiliar words and say them aloud. You never really know a word until you are on speaking terms with it. In daily news­paper reading make it a point to circle all unfamiliar words and look them up later in the dictionary. Your vocabulary will be enormously enriched with expressions that are alive and part of today's living language. Study prefixes and suffixes. Know­ing them thoroughly will greatly increase your perception rate. These prefixes and suffixes are reading facts which should always lie on the rim of the mind.
   
   
7. Pacing (Chapter Seven). If you have not already learned the four general categories of reading material described in Chapter Seven you should do so now. They are basic in decid­ing your reading purpose and so will serve as a guide in fixing your speed. The speed at which a person reads in the two slower categories — reading to evaluate and criticize ideas, reading for self-enrichment — depends directly on his back­ground of knowledge and therefore his ability to comprehend. Reading speed will vary widely with different individuals on the same selection. The drill is to stretch yourself constantly by reading just a little faster than is comfortable but at which comprehension keeps pace with speed. Using the Pacing Card at times will help you to read evenly, and this is important. Do not slow below the rate at which your comprehension keeps pace. Now that you are reading everything more rapidly you can probably handle difficult material faster than you may believe.  Don't be afraid of it.

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