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Reference/Reading Skills

™
g Easier!
The fun and easy way® to Making Everythin
become a more efficient,
effective reader!
Want to read faster — and recall more of what you Open the book and find:

ding
read? This practical, hands-on guide gives you the

Rea

Speed Reading
Speed
techniques you need to increase your reading speed • Tried-and-true techniques from
The Reader’s Edge® program
and retention, whether you’re reading books, e-mails,
magazines, or even technical journals! You’ll find • How to assess your current
reading aids and plenty of exercises to help you read reading level
faster and better comprehend the text.
• Tools and exercises to improve
• Yes, you can speed read — discover the skills you your reading skills
need to read quickly and effectively, break your bad
• Speed-reading fundamentals
reading habits, and take in more text at a glance
you must know
• Focus on the fundamentals — widen your vision
span and see how to increase your comprehension, • Helpful lists of prefixes, suffixes,
retention, and recall roots, and prime words
• Advance your speed-reading skills — read blocks • A speed-reading progress
of text, heighten your concentration, and follow an worksheet
author’s thought patterns
• Zero in on key points — skim, scan, and preread to • Exercises for eye health and
quickly locate the information you want expanded reading vision

• Expand your vocabulary — recognize the most • Tips for making your speed-
common words and phrases to help you move reading skills permanent
through the text more quickly

Learn to:
Go to dummies.com® • Increase your reading speed and
for more! comprehension
• Use speed techniques for any type of
reading material
• Improve your silent reading skills
• Recall more of what you read

$16.99 US / $19.99 CN / £12.99 UK

Richard Sutz is the founder and CEO of The Literacy ISBN 978-0-470-45744-3
Company, developers of The Reader’s Edge® speed-reading
program. Sutz’s program teaches silent reading fluency
for effective and efficient speed reading. Peter Weverka Richard Sutz
is the author of many For Dummies books. His articles Founder and CEO, The Literacy Company
and stories have appeared in Harper’s, SPY, and other Sutz
magazines. Weverka with Peter Weverka
 Chapter 1

Of Course You Can

Speed Read!
In This Chapter
▶ Understanding the act of reading
▶ Examining speed-reading myths
▶ Finding the right spot for successful speed reading
▶ Demonstrating to yourself that you can speed read

I f you’re a typical reader, your reading education ended in the

third grade, and you currently read using the same techniques
you used as a third grader. You’re not reading as fast as you want
because no one taught you the skills to read faster.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that everybody can increase their reading speed
by adopting a few simple techniques. Beyond those techniques, by
being a committed reader, applying speed-reading principles, and
reading with more concentration, you can read very quickly —
perhaps doubling or even tripling your current reading speed. You
can also read with better comprehension and retain and recall what
you read. What’s more, you can get more pleasure and meaning
from the books, articles, and Web pages you read.

This chapter introduces basic speed-reading concepts and demon-

strates why anyone can become a speed reader. At the end of the
chapter, you can find an exercise that lets you put speed-reading
skills to the test and see for yourself just how helpful a few tech-
niques can be.

05_457443-ch01.indd 9 6/23/09 8:35:11 PM

 10 Part I: Introducing Speed Reading

What Is Speed Reading, Anyway?

When you read the words on the page of a book or newspaper
article, what goes on in your head? Do you also hear the words as
you read them? If you do, someone is speaking them, and unless a
leprechaun is sitting on your shoulder, that someone is you.

Reading engages the eyes, ears, mouth, and, of course, the brain.
Speed reading engages these senses even more than normal read-
ing because you use your senses and brain power even more
efficiently. The following sections explain in detail what goes on in
your eyes, ears, mouth, and brain when you speed read.

Speed reading is seeing

First and foremost, speed reading is seeing; the first step in read-
ing anything is seeing the words. But how do you see words on the
page when you read?

Prior to 1920 or so, researchers and educators believed that

people read one word at a time. To read, they thought, you moved
your eyes left to right across the page, taking in one word after the
other. Under this theory, fast readers were people who could iden-
tify and recognize the words faster.

However, all but beginning readers have the ability to see and read
more than one word at a time. As you move your eyes left to right
across the page, you jump ahead in fits and starts, taking in any-
where between one and five words at a time in quick glances.

These quick glances, when your eyes stop moving at different

points in a sentence as you read it, are called eye fixations. I get
into more detail on how eye fixations work in Chapter 3, but for
now, the important points to know about speed reading are

✓ You read several words in a single glance. Unless you’re

encountering words you don’t know or haven’t read before,
you don’t read words one at a time.
✓ You expand your vision so that you can read and understand
many words in a single glance. A very good speed reader can
read, see, and process 10 to 14 words in a single eye fixation.
✓ You expand your vision to read vertically as well as horizon-
tally on the page. As well as taking in more than one word on a
line of text, speed readers can also, in a single glance, read and
understand words on two or three different lines. Check out
Chapter 6 for more on expanding your reading vision, and head
to Chapter 15 for some exercises that help you do just that.

05_457443-ch01.indd 10 6/23/09 8:35:11 PM