Speed Reading for Success

The average person reads at about 240 words per minute, but with training you can push that up to 1,000 words or more. In fact Jane Smith claims in this practical audio book that with regular practice you could read a Harry Potter book in two hours!

Her main emphasis at the start of the ten unit course is to recommend that you get rid of bad reading habits. These include sub-vocalisation (reading out loud in your head) regression (unnecessary re-reading as you go along) and reading every word separately. The reason for this is that our eyes do not take in information this way. What you should do instead is take in groups of words, make shorter fixations, keep moving forwards all the time, and keep your eye on the page all the time.


One successful technique for this is to use a physical guide - a pencil or your finger - which you drag down the page at a constant speed. Your objective is to keep up with it and resist the temptation to indulge in back-skipping and longer fixations.

She also emphasises some of the central issues of reading skills - the fact that there are different types of reading, and that you should be conscious of your reading purpose. These types boil down to skimming, scanning, and power reading. Skimming is where you are looking at a book, not reading it; scanning is where you are searching for a particular piece of information; and power reading is where you put together all the techniques she recommends to read and absorb information at rates you could hardly imagine before.

All this is done in gradual stages, and she recommends short, regular practice sessions with rests in between to boost your confidence. You can pause the CD to make the practice tests, and record your results in the booklet which summarises the content and provides ready-made progress charts for you to fill in.

And there are valuable gains to be made from all this. Most neurologists now agree that the activity of absorbing, storing, and recording information (making notes) creates neural pathways in the brain.

She's got a pleasant and a non-patronising speaking voice, and I found the experience of learning through listening an easy one. Now it's just a question of which Harry Potter book to choose.