Review: Speed Reading For Dummies

Speed Reading For Dummies by Richard Sutz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Good practical book :) This book is for beginners who want to be able to read quickly yet have better comprehension, retention, and get more meaning and pleasure out of reading.

Basically...
- Don't vocalize the words you read, take in several words at a time
- See the words don't hear them
- Improve your vocabulary in order to be able to speed read more.

I speed read through this book lol Half the book were exercises that you can do to practice speed reading. I didn't even go through the exercises because I read enough to practice speed reading else where instead of their boring examples ;)

The main points I took away are below.
- Speed reading actually increases reading comprehension. Because you read several words at a time when you speed read, you can pick up the meaning of words in context. This ability to read in context improves comprehension because each word in the sentence gives meaning to the other words instead of standing alone.
- A pacer is a reading aid such as a card or your hand that directs you where to look on the page when you read.
- You have to know when to skim, when to read fast, and when to slow down to get the gist of it.
- Speed reading, requires sustained, forceful concentration because when you speed read, you do many things at once
- Speed reading is seeing; the first step in reading anything is seeing the words
- You read several words in a single glance (must have good vocabulary), You expand your vision so that you can read and understand many words in a single glance, You expand your vision to read vertically as well as horizontally on the page
- The problem with the sound-it-out approach to reading is that it slows you down. You read not at the speed you think but rather at the speed you talk - Training yourself not to vocalize when you read is one of the most important speed-reading skills you can acquire.
- vocalizing affects comprehension. If you move your lips or mimic speech when you read, you engage a part of your mind in speech activities when you really ought to devote it to grasping
the author’s ideas.
- motor readers move lips and tongue etc when they read which is very slow, auditory readers are better because hey read silently, visual readers are most efficient because they vocalize minimally, they engage their eyes and minds when they read
- how to silence your vocalization:
1 Try to perceive the words rather than see them. Imagine that each word is a symbol (not a sound) that conveys a meaning.
2 Turn off your ears. Pretend your ears have a volume control and turn it to the mute setting.
3 Widen your field of vision. By taking in more words on a line, you force yourself to read more words at a time, and this helps prevent vocalization.
4 Identify the thought units in sentences, not the words, and read thought unit by thought unit rather than word by word.
5 Concentrate harder when you read. Much of being a speed reader comes down to concentrating harder than you used to.
- expanding your vocabulary helps in speed reading because you don't have to stop and vocalize that word and check dictionary, a good way to understand a new words meaning is to break it up into a the prefix, root, and suffix, prefix is beginning of word, root is middle, and suffix is the end - neologism - neo is new - log is word - ism is condition or manner, thus a new word/phrase.


View all my reviews