You should have a figure of your current reading speed in the first column of the record chart. If you skipped the Introduction, go back and read it before continuing.
In this chapter I aim to put your speed into context. You will see how you compare with the world record holder, presidents and professors. Don’t let this intimidate you at the start of your journey. Over the course of this book you will see your speed build bit by bit as I introduce you to more components of the technique. Most very fast readers started off reading slowly.
I will also discuss how speed reading is an important part of a wider arsenal in the fight against the tyranny of information overload.
We will look at common problems that almost every group that I teach come up with and examine your beliefs about reading. This will serve as a useful comparison to Chapter 12 at the end of the book.
I will also offer some advice for increasing comprehension simply by putting in a little preparation before embarking on reading.
Information overload
We are living in a time of ever-increasing amounts of information. In 2010 Google counted what they consider to be every single book in the world, arriving at a staggering total of 129,864,880. A person living today receives more information in a single day than someone living in the seventeenth century received during the course of an entire lifetime.
Digital overload
The advent of the computer and the internet has hastened the pace of information generation. Google now estimates that there are over a trillion web pages. As of 2007, the world’s information storage capacity was an estimated 295 exabytes. In the same year we broadcast nearly 1.9 zettabytes of data, equivalent to each person on the planet reading 174 newspapers daily (Hilbert and Lopez 2011; quoted in Griffiths and Costi 2011). With the democratisation of electronic publishing and broadcasting, anyone can be an author with an average of 58 million tweets on Twitter per day (www.statisticbrain.com) and 450 million English-speaking blogs.
Email has become ubiquitous, taking up a massive amount of time. Recently it was estimated that 247 billion email messages are sent per day worldwide, 81 per cent of which are spam. We need to break our addiction to Facebook and devices like BlackBerries, iPhones, etc that tie us to email and reading unnecessary messages. I know this is easier said than done. I was lost without my laptop when it had to go into repair in February 2012. I had no email and no web access. With my VAT return having to be filed online and my banking internet-based, I had to borrow an iPad to meet the deadlines and avoid a fine. It was a salutary lesson in just how technology-dependent life has become. In her highly thought-provoking 2003 book Tomorrow’s People, Professor Susan Greenfield warns of the dangers to the mind and individuality resulting from new scientific advances and increasing interconnectedness.
Information overload in business
The majority of the world’s corporate memory is stored in some sort of paper form. Having too much information is having devastating consequences on business and a typical enterprise spends between 3 and 5 per cent of its revenues managing documents. This cost is frequently higher than what they invest in research and development (Xerox internal study). Swamped by information, mistakes inevitably happen with 42 per cent of people accidentally using the wrong information at least once per week; 53 per cent believe less than half of the information they receive is valuable (Griffiths and Costi 2011).
How about you?
- How long do you spend reading and responding to email?
- Do you have a stack of unread newspapers and magazines?
- Do you have unread books on your bookshelf?
- Do you have boxes, drawers, files or stacks of reports, letters and other information all unread?
Almost everyone at one time or another feels overwhelmed with the glut of information bombarding us. We are drowning!
So what is the solution?
Technology has a role to play. Most email programs now have an automatic spam filtering function. Internet service providers can also install mail filters in their mail transfer agents as a service to all of their customers. This can’t yet eradicate spam, with clever marketers finding ways to circumvent automated systems, though the technology is becoming more and more sophisticated. You can reduce the amount of reading required to find a relevant fact on the web by using intelligent internet search tools such as Wolfram Alpha, written by British scientist Stephen Wolfram. This is described as an ‘answer engine’ rather than a ‘search engine’. Wolfram Alpha is capable of responding to particularly phrased, fact-based questions in natural English. The technology is still in its infancy but will undoubtedly develop.
Being selective in your reading is vital. You need to filter out the unnecessary information. You could ask, ‘How do you know what is important until you have read it?’ In Chapter 6 I will explain how to work with document structure to find where the important nuggets are located and use techniques such as skimming and scanning to get a précis before committing to reading in depth.
The final piece of the puzzle, once you have reduced the tsunami of information to a mere flood, is reading faster. So how fast is it possible to read and how do you compare to super speed readers?
Speeds across the population
The average reading speed is in the region of 200 to 240 words per minute (wpm) with about 60 to 80 per cent comprehension. This varies according to the difficulty of the text and the other factors such as tiredness, time of day, etc that we will discuss in later chapters. When studying and note-taking, speed can drop to under 90wpm. How does your current speed compare with this average? Don’t worry if you scored less than 200wpm. With the techniques in this book you can easily double or triple your speed and, with practice, increase it even more.
Functional literacy
The term ‘functional literacy’ came into common use in the 1960s, when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) began addressing the lack of literacy skills among a large percentage of the population of adults and out-of-school children in developing countries. The term is used in different contexts but can be broadly defined as the level of skill needed to ‘function fully in society and meet personal and social needs in general education’. The characteristics of functional literacy vary from one culture to another, as some cultures require better reading and writing skills than others. A reading level that might be sufficient to make a farmer functionally literate in a rural area of a developing country might not qualify as functional illiteracy in an urban area of a technologically advanced country. About 20 years ago UNESCO established a minimum reading rate they thought people needed to achieve in order to be functionally literate in developed countries of 400wpm. As already discussed, the pace of change has increased so rapidly that the 400wpm minimum speed is almost certainly out of date. A level of at least 600wpm may be more appropriate.
Super speed readers
In surveys of general reading speed, about 1 in 100 people read at between 800 and 1,000wpm. People in this range are usually in roles where they need to read extensively for their work. This includes top professors, researchers, politicians or editors. The figure falls to one in a thousand for individuals reading at speeds over 1,000wpm. The world record holder, former English teacher Anne Jones, was able to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in under 47 minutes immediately after it was realised at midnight on 21 July 2007. This equates to a rate of 4,251wpm. Her comprehension was sufficiently good to write a credible review of the book for the following day’s newspapers and Sky News. To do this she had to familiarise herself with J.K. Rowling’s literary style and spend time training, just as a physical athlete would in preparation for a major race. Despite this remarkable performance, Anne does not have a natural talent for reading. She just uses the techniques that I cover in this book and puts in a lot of practice.
Other individuals who have learnt to speed read with good effect include US Presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. Kennedy was a great proponent of speed reading. He reached speeds of around 1,000wpm after taking a speed reading course with his brother Bobby and encouraged many in his Cabinet to take similar courses. This helped make speed reading popular throughout the United States in the 1960s.
‘There was a time when, as a software developer, I carried a single textbook around with me to ensure that I could address any technical issue I encountered. The book was The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie and a knowledge of its contents ensured I could create computer programs for any of the hardware platforms available.
How things have changed! It seems that these days I am dealing with a new technology every week. This causes me to constantly read new publications dealing with the many facets of modern software development. So when I came across the concept of speed reading I looked into its claims and decided that although the claims were obviously exaggerated, even a modest improvement in my reading speed would be beneficial, so I enrolled in a course. During the course I was amazed that my reading speed improved from 148 words per minute to 1,000 words per minute! I used my new found ability to read a 4,000 page technical manual in an hour – which resulted in a new level of reading enjoyment coupled with enhanced comprehension of the content.’
Barry Connor, Founder of dotNet Specialists
It is important to remember that once you have mastered speed reading you can choose how fast you want to read. If you have a lot of material that you have to assimilate rapidly then speed reading will be the ideal technique. If, on the other hand, you go to bed with a book or e-reader and your aim is to relax, it would be more appropriate to read deliberately slowly. We will consider this idea of a range of reading speeds in more detail later (Chapter 12).
Often the purpose of reading is to gather information. If you can get what you need without reading every word that is great. Take what you need from a text and move on.
Typical problems with reading
Having taught speed reading to many different nationalities, I hear similar problems are mentioned regardless of age, cultural background, gender or level of education. A typical selection of comments include:
Fear
- Faced with a large book I feel intimidated.
- If I speed up, I am frightened that I will be missing important points.
Overload
- The pace of technological changes is so fast that I can’t keep up.
- Time is too short to read even a fraction of what I need to.
Frustration
- I am frustrated by the lack of progress made when reading.
- Reading feels like a chore or a punishment.
- I am frustrated and intolerant of books that don’t get to the point. I resent having to read too much description before anything happens. Life’s too short!
- When I proofread emails, I never notice the mistakes until after I click ‘Send’.
- Why can I never spot errors in my own writing?
Guilt and social pressure
- There are too many books that I should read.
- I feel guilty that I am neglecting my family when I spend hours reading.
- We have been conditioned to always read a book from beginning to end, slowly and one word at a time.
- When you should read a book for work it becomes a burden. I have lots of books that I should read but I haven’t and lots of books that I have read for pleasure that were easy to read fast.
Lack of focus
- I will often drift off into my imagination when reading.
- I am easily distracted.
- I get inspired by ideas in the book and my mind wanders.
- I start to daydream when I should be reading.
- I can’t concentrate or focus for long.
- I don’t finish books. With my iPad I can carry around many more books than I physically used to be able to. I end up reading several in parallel. I jump around and never finish any.
- I have to keep going back over text, sometimes four times.
Boredom
- If there aren’t graphics, colour and nice fonts in a book I get bored.
- When I start to read, I feel tired and sleepy.
- When I open a book my heart sinks.
Can you relate to any of the above problems? Over the course of reading this book these challenges will all be addressed and eliminated.
Increasing comprehension through questioning
Research has shown that if you ask yourself questions before you study or read you will be more engaged and retain more information. Good teachers and lecturers ask their students to discuss and think about questions rather than simply give them the answers. The word ‘educate’ is directly derived from the Latin word ‘educare’. The literal translation is ‘to draw out of’ or ‘to lead out of’. The Romans considered educating to be synonymous with drawing knowledge out of somebody or leading them out of their usual thinking. This is closely related to the teaching of the Greek philosopher, Socrates. The Socratic Method employs a series of questions formulated as tests of logic and fact intended to help a person or group discover their beliefs about a given topic.
How do you do this in practice?
Obviously, if you are reading with a specific goal in mind, for example, researching information for an essay or a report, you should have well-defined questions and therefore be well-prepared for effective reading. This will not only direct your reading towards a goal, but also help to focus your attention. Try to raise questions that lead to more active reading. These could include:
- What clues does the title/subtitle reveal?
- What expectations do you have?
- What information do you know about this topic?
- Why are you reading this article?
- What information do you hope this article will include?
- What questions do you hope this article will answer?
- Do you know this author’s work?
- Have you read other pieces written by this author?
- What do you know about the kinds of writing this author has composed?
- Why do you think the author wrote this article?
If your reading is more general, then you can employ Rudyard Kipling’s Six Honest Serving Men:
The six questions make a good starting point to tackle a book. Of course you need to adapt them to the particular situation. In a study book, ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ will probably be more important than the other three. These can be developed further to give more specific questions as follows:
Definition
- What is … ?
- Where does … fit?
- What group does … belong to?
Characteristics
- How would I describe … ?
- What does … look like?
- What are its parts?
Examples
- What is a good example of … ?
- What are similar examples that share attributes but differ in some way?
- Why did the author choose the examples they did?
Experience
- What experience have I had with … ?
- What can I imagine about … ?
When reading this book, if you like, you can read the Comprehension questions at the end of the chapter before reading the text. This may slightly skew the measure of comprehension, as you will be hunting for the answers in the text. If you are focused on getting the most out of the book, knowing the questions in advance will help. If, on the other hand, you want quantitative data on your improvement then it is best to read first and look at the questions afterwards.
STOP YOUR TIMER NOW (word count 2,911)
Comprehension questions
- How many billion dollars in productivity does the US economy lose to information overload each year? [1]
- Name two ways that technology can help reduce information overload. [2]
- What is the average reading speed and comprehension? [2]
- What speed did UNESCO declare as the minimum to be classed functionally literate? [1]
- To the nearest thousand words per minute, how fast did Anne Jones read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? [1]
- Name two of the six main categories of problem mentioned. [2]
- What can you do before reading to increase comprehension and retention? [1]
Check your answers in Appendix 1.
Number of points × 10 = % comprehension
Calculation
| Timer reading | |
| Minutes: | |
| Seconds: | divide by 60 and add to whole minutes |
| 2,911/time = | Speed (words per minute) |
Enter your comprehension and speed in the chart in the Introduction.
Your attitudes and preconceptions about reading
You probably don’t often think about your attitudes and beliefs about reading. Many of these attitudes originate from your schooling as a child. Did you always simply take your teachers’ word for it or do you have direct evidence to back up your beliefs? This book will challenge some of those beliefs. Complete the exercise below as a snapshot of your current thoughts about the nature of reading.
Consider each of the statements overleaf. Place a tick in the left-hand column if the statement is true, the middle column if you were taught this in the past but now believe it is not true and the right-hand column if it is false. Leave blank if you don’t know.
We will return to this list in Chapter 12.