10 Days To Faster Reading (2001) will get you through the pile of books you simply need to read. By renewing your thinking and breaking bad habits, replacing them with the most effective reading skills, you will read faster and absorb more than ever before.
This book is for:
- Anyone who wants to read faster and remember more from what they have read;
- Educators want to find a new strategy in reading to students;
- Students and avid readers.
About the author:
Abby Marks Beale is the founder of The Corporate Educator, the author of Success Skills: Strategies for Study and Lifelong Learning , and the creator of Rev It Up Reading – a program that helps people hone their skills and speed reading level.
What does this book have for you? Read faster and remember more from what you read.
If you were granted three wishes from a genie, you would probably start by having millions of dollars or being able to fly like a bird. But for some people, especially those who love reading but don't have enough time to read all the books they want, will wish to have the ability to read books at super speed.
The following summary pages certainly won't give you that speed, but you don't need a genie to become a better and faster reader – you just need to learn how to break bad habits and become a better reader. practice some necessary skills.
10 Days to Read Faster claims that we can read faster in just ten days. The following summary pages include reading best practices, tips, and a few examples. Start practicing it right away with daily newspapers or other documents you keep lying around, and you're well on your way to becoming a faster reader, remembering more of what you read.
You will learn:
- Why are we wrong about reading books;
- How to get 40% of a book's content without reading it;
- What happens to your brain when it doesn't take in as much information as it can handle.
People often put too much burden on themselves when they read.
There is so much to read but so little time. That's the problem most of us have. Every day we find more and more new books, which means that the pile of books we have to read is increasing day by day.
But the real problem is not the timing. The problem is that you don't read them effectively because of some old misconceptions about reading.
First, you really don't have to read everything in books or newspapers to understand them. In fact, reading everything is impossible. Instead, you should form the habit of choosing what is really important to you. We'll talk about that later, but as you can see, it's actually quite easy to read if you go through the material first and clearly identify what interests you.
Second, you don't have to remember everything you read from a book to learn something from them. We get this error from studying in school, where we are under so much pressure from memorizing all the content in our textbooks, because our tests rely on content from that book.
However, the material we can memorize is stored in the short-term memory in the brain and is usually forgotten after only a few days. If you want to retain information for the future, you need to create a system that easily recalls memory.
Try jotting down key information (electronically or on paper) or highlighting it or jotting it down in the corner. And then, we can easily get rid of the whole bunch of lengthy documents. This way, you can easily find the information you need, taking away the burden of having to memorize everything.
Finally, people often mistakenly believe that reading should not take place during work hours. However, the opposite is true! Reading is really part of your job description.
Business people often think that they will be delayed in their work if they read while they are working. However, work-related materials can help you come up with new business ideas, keep abreast of market movements, and perhaps figure out how to beat your competition.
So don't be afraid to read while working – it's so important!
Becoming a more effective reader is as easy as kicking a few bad habits.
If you do something for a while, you will form a habit around it and the same goes for reading. So what are the bad habits in reading, how will you fix them?
A very common bad habit is wandering while reading. When we read, we have a million other problems in mind, none of which are really related to what we're reading.
Our goal should be to turn this futility into a flexible cognitive mindset—a kind of thinking in which we can associate the information we're reading with our own experiences. In this way, we have connected different knowledge: what we already know and what we will learn.
This is simply aligning your thinking in the right direction. For example, imagine that you are reading an article about Italian art. Then re-imagine your trip to Italy last year. This connection is the glue of the brain that helps you to attach and absorb new information easily.
One thing that makes reading ineffective is going back, or rereading what you just read. To avoid that, try covering up what you've just read with a business card, leaving just enough space for the line you're reading. Re-reading what you've just read is often a waste of time, but if you really don't understand the author's implications or accidentally miss a sentence, this rereading is really beneficial. .
Finally, a lot of people read out loud when they learn to read. Normally the brain can process 400 words a minute, but when we read at a talking speed, we only read about 150 words. So if you stop reading out loud, you can double your word acquisition.
When you want to speed up your reading, focus on the key words and leave out the rest. Another tactic is reading aloud, muttering in your mouth, or chewing gum while reading, all of which can boost your reading speed.
You can read faster by summarizing.
So now you know what bad habits while reading are. But how can you become a faster and more effective reader? Try getting started with these three simple steps.
First, have a clear goal and responsibility for what you read. This will help you read in a more organized and focused way.
Choose which books to read or which books to skip by asking yourself, “Why am I reading this?”. For example, if you want to advance your knowledge in a particular field or keep up with the changes in the world, you can completely throw away the academic journals from two years ago.
Then ask yourself, “Why do I need this information?”, it can help with your test or a meeting or it can help your child do better in school. But if your child is already doing pretty well, do you really need to read their homework over and over again every day?
So, before reading any material, ask yourself these two essential questions; If you can't find the answer then you better not read it.
Second, preview the material before you actually start reading it so you can visualize the main content and see what part of it appeals to you.
Start by reading a few introductory paragraphs to get an idea of what the intro is about. Then read the subtitles that are usually bold and louder. Finally, read the first sentences of each paragraph to determine what each paragraph is about.
Pre-reading gives you the background information, which then helps you read and summarize the text faster and reduce rereading. Once you have the basic information, you don't need to reread it over and over to make sure you've understood it correctly.
Previewing, in fact, gets you 40% of the document's main message. The rest are just lengthy and confusing explanations.
The third and final step to help you improve your speed reading skills, we will explore in the following section.
To speed up reading, try reading only keywords.
The third step to becoming a more effective reader is learning how to read faster. For most of us, learning how to read stops right at the elementary level, so our reading methods are out of date. The following summary pages will give you new reading strategies that you can apply to yourself. Try them all and see what works best for you.
The first skill involves reading only the important words and skimming the rest. When we are reading, our eyes tend to "jump" to the beginning and the end rather than reading smoothly.
To read fluently is quite as simple as finding keywords, which are often long words and often have many important words in a sentence. Usually, it's more than three letters long and carries some meaning. For example, try reading only the words that are bolded in the next sentence: Work is defined by multiple steps and components.
See? You don't have to read the entire sentence to understand the meaning, so just reading the important words should suffice.
Another tactic is to stop your eyes on a group of words instead of individual words. Imagine that sentences are separated by slashes: By looking at/ at a group/ you force your eyes/ to glide faster/ while/ withholding/ what is needed.
Summarizing the whole sentence at each stop requires you to take a broader view. You can practice it in a number of different ways, like glancing at the sentence and trying to rewrite it. Or when you're stuck in traffic, take a quick glance at the license plate in front of you and read it again.
Don't be surprised if your eyes feel overwhelmed if you practice following these strategies, they are just getting used to them. The more you practice, the better your eyes will become.
Other techniques you should try are “reading between lines” and “typesetting”.
Here are a few great tips for becoming a better reader:
One way to overcome the habit of reading silently is to focus on the white space on each sentence. In this way, you can still see the upper half of the letters and from there can understand them easily without having to fix them.
The idea of this is to go through the words without getting stuck anywhere. You can do this more effectively if you don't look at the words directly.
Another tactic known as the "typesetting" method involves using your broad vision. Instead of placing your eyes at the beginning of each line, try focusing your gaze half an inch into the left margin, and then stop reading half an inch ahead in the right margin. You can still see the beginning and end of a sentence using your vision.
By not focusing as much on each word, you minimize the starting and ending points when you look at sentences. If your eyes stop seven or eight times per line and you can reduce it to just one, your reading speed can increase by up to 10%!
This may not come naturally to some people. To help you get used to starting a line, draw lines about half an inch in both margins. This way, you can clearly know where you start reading and where you stop to rest.
Relearning a skill you already have can feel unnecessary and annoying. Get used to it! Because it's natural that sometimes you can get worse after you've gotten pretty good.
Use your hand or pen to guide your eyes and get into the habit of reading faster.
When you learn to read as children, we always use a finger or something else to point to what we are reading and that helps to understand the meaning of words better. So why do we stop practicing that skill when we already know how to read? We should really practice it, because in practice it brings a lot of benefits.
Our eyes tend to follow movements. For example, when there is a fly in the room, your eyes will recognize it immediately. Similarly, placing and moving your finger can help your eyes scroll through text more quickly. Simply place your finger to the left or right of a line and as you read, move your finger slowly from the part you read to the end of the text.
When reading small and narrow columns of text like what you might see in newspaper articles, you can place your finger in the middle of a paragraph directly below the sentence you're reading. Move it straight from top to bottom or move it like a slithering snake to help you orient your eyes.
Next, cover the paragraph you just reread to avoid re-reading. One way to do this is to use business cards; Another simple way is to use your own hands. Clasp your left hand and leave only one thumb out. Then simply place your hand horizontally or vertically on the passage you just finished reading.
Similar to the business card usage you already know, covering the passage you've just read will help prevent you from re-reading it.
These methods can be uncomfortable or even embarrassing, but they will help you speed up your reading. Like driving training, you probably don't need to worry about it anymore once you're good at driving.
Summary
The main message of this book is:
For most of us, learning how to read ends in elementary school, which means that our reading skills are truly out of date. If you want to get the best out of your reading, you need to relearn how to prioritize, preview, and speed up reading to keep up with the fast-paced world of today.
Give advice:
Take a break every 20 minutes.
Studies have shown that while reading, people can only really concentrate for about 20 minutes at a time, so don't go over that limit. Give yourself a 5-minute break after 20 to 30 minutes of reading to give your brain and eyes time to rest. And remember, don't read for more than an hour at a time!
