The Rewards of Better Reading

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.

But even as it is, your training in faster reading so far has geared you to enjoy reading a great deal more and to read with greater intelligence. If you have worked conscientiously, there have been four major advances in your reading facility. Here they are:

1. Rapid reading has waked up both eyes and mind to receive images and ideas quickly and clearly.
   
   
2. Concentration now keeps attention from wandering. Your mind is fully engaged by what you read.
   
   
3. An expanded vocabulary now helps you recognize and understand many more words than you did before.
   
   
4. Pacing your reading speed to suit different kinds of material helps develop comprehension.

The Program of Part Two

You are now going to consolidate these advances. The rewards ahead develop progressively, one from the other, just as did the skills in the Seven Steps to Faster Reading. These are the real goals you have been working toward. There are five:

1. You will train yourself to remember or "retain" more easily — to retain what you read and store it away as a new part of your background knowledge — to be drawn on in future reading experiences.
   
   
2. Better retention produces better comprehension. The information, ideas and points of view you are constantly  acquiring  become  an  ever-widening base on which comprehension depends.
   
   
3. Broader comprehension, in turn, leads to greater skill in handling critical material — that is to say, the articles and books which express opinions and views that can be controversial. You will want to weigh this kind of material before you accept or reject the views.
   
   
4. These advanced reading skills force you to stretch your vocabulary constantly as you encounter un­ familiar words.   Chapter Ten gives you a new method of increasing word recognition through the use of your newspaper.
   
   
5. Finally, the biggest reward of all is the one you give to yourself through vastly increased reading in many fields.

This is the program laid out in Part Two, and you will be following it all your life. I do not mean practicing drills and exercises as such. When you finish the book, the techniques should be a part of you which you will use always to stretch yourself in the new knowledge and enjoyment you gain from books and other reading through this faster and better way.

By acquiring the full skill of better reading you will awaken a fresh curiosity to learn. If you are past thirty you may think you had lost the hunger for learning years ago. Most such people have left it dormant only because heavy reading seemed such a chore. With new skill the urge quickly returns. For young people in high school and college, advanced reading facility sharply increases the desire to learn. At any age better reading stimulates the appetite. There is a rich pride of accom­plishment in the assurance that you are an expert reader.

People sometimes ask me if their new facility is permanent. "Will I lose my speed if I don't practice exercises constantly?" From my own experience in the Reading Laboratory with thou­sands of individuals I can answer confidently that you will not lose your speed once these techniques are wholly a part of you — as long as you keep on reading. For in the very act of read­ing you do practice. In everything you read the skills are at work.  The answer is really as simple as that.

In part two you will find more tests, but by now you should also be reading books on your own. As you do, keep on timing yourself. Since you will now be reading for long periods and over many pages, you will not need to use the chart on page 8 or the timing technique explained in the Introduction to Part One for short exercises in which seconds are important. You will need a pencil and paper now to do some simple math­ematics. Here are the steps by which you figure your score in these longer reading sessions:

1. You don't need to count every word you read. You count the pages, and your first chore is to find the average number of words on each. To do this, count the number of words in each of 12 or 15 lines anywhere in your book. Find the average number of words per line.   Say it works out to be 11.
   
   
2. Now count the number of lines of type on a full page of text. Suppose it is 35.  Multiply 11 X 35, and this will give the average number of words on a page — 385.
   
   
3. Now multiply 385 by the number of pages you covered and divide the answer by the number of minutes you read.   For example, you read 100 pages of 385 words in one hour and 20 minutes —— 38,500 words in 80 minutes. Divide 38,500 by 80 to find your speed — 482 words a minute.

To be quite realistic in your progress, it is a good idea to keep a notebook which not only preserves a running record of reading speed but notes down the sort of material you were reading. Always remember that speed will — and should — vary with different kinds of reading. If you read a mystery novel last night at 670 words a minute and a biography tonight at 425, do not think that you are losing ground. The variation is simply the result of pacing speed to comprehension. As time goes on, you should increase that rate of 425 words on the biography, but your score on this kind of material will always be slower than on light reading.

After a while, you will no longer be concerned with speed per minute. It is fun to figure now — and don't miss any of the satisfaction a faster word count brings. When you have consolidated all the skills so that you use them quite uncon­sciously your pleasure will grow out of the assurance that you are reading much more rapidly — with full comprehension — whatever the material happens to be.

That sort of heightened skill is what you are working toward now as you begin Part Two.

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