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Reading is skill that is required for everyday life. Reading is the only way we can get information from text to our brain. If you want more knowledge, you need more reading. Now what if you could read faster? What if you could absorb a huge quantity of knowledge, or read more stories than ever by developing and improving your current skills. I for one would love to be able to read faster.

It has been a while now that I’m trying to gather information on reading faster and improving your reading skills. There are many books out there, many companies and tutorials that are supposed to make your reading speeds skyrocket.

I have come across techniques from different resources that all have the same goal which is to make you read faster; everything from “try reading 2-3 words at a time” to photo reading where you “mentally photograph a whole page of text”.

Right off the bat, I will tell you one thing, all the books that you will read will contain 95% filler and 5% actual helpful information. That is, the ‘real technique’ or the ‘essence’ of the book can most of the time easily be reduced to 2-3 pages or even less, but who would pay $30 for a 3 page book?

Some sites, like photoreading.com, say on their front page that with their techniques you can read up to 25,000 words a minute. This equals to 416 words a second. To give you an idea, a full page, filled to bottom, in a word document, single spaced, font times new roman size 12 is around 600 words. Being able to read two thirds of 8½ X 11 filled page in 1 second is something that I consider close to impossible. To give you another example, they are basically saying you can read a 200 page regular size book in 3 minutes. THREE MINUTES!

I will tell you one thing, some of the methods I found over time by questioning people and reading books do actually work, but you need a lot of practice, so much that you actually wonder if it’s worth it.

However, there is a clear distinction that has to be made. Reading faster is one thing, absorbing the information is another one. Being able to “photo read” a page in a second by knowing that it’s talking about cars is one thing, but being able to read it and actually understanding the complex explanations about the cars is another. I doubt anyone can read a page in a second by fully absorbing and understanding what they just read.

If you want to read faster and actually not make your reading a waste of time with some magic techniques, read everything by groups of word. Start small, like 2 words at a time. After you get comfortable get to 3 words a time, etc…You will see an improvement of speed pretty quickly. Most every other methods you will come by will either be just like this technique or be a waste of time and money.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 6:14 am and is filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.