Print Smart

Original HP inks give you up to

34 per cent more pages than refill inks

Techniques to try
A guide to speed reading
Focus on eye movement
Imagine that you have a book in front of you. With your forefinger, trace the speed
and movement at which your eyes read. Did you move your finger smoothly from
left to right in a continuous motion?
Virtually everyone believes that their eyes move smoothly along the lines. But
this is not so. In order to take in any image, the eye has to be still in relation to
what it has seen. This is why, when you are travelling on a train and see a station
sign, you swivel your head as the train passes the sign, so your eye can fix on the
sign and enable you to read it.
Therefore, when your eye is travelling across the still words on a page, it has to
pause on each word in the sentence.
The slow reader will pause (these pauses are called fixations) on only one or
two words at a time. But speed readers take in three, four, five or six words at a
glance – doubling, tripling or quadrupling the slow readers’ speed.

Use a guide
Children often place a finger underneath the word they are reading, to improve
focus and concentration. Research now confirms that a guide (a pen, pencil or
chopstick is a good tool) will help you to read faster and more effectively, with
less eye strain.
When you are looking up a word in a dictionary, or a name or telephone number
in a directory, do you use a finger or a pen or a pencil? And if you are adding up a
column of figures, do you run down it with your thumb or a pen or pencil? Virtually
everyone does.
All you will be doing when you transfer this basic and latent skill to the printed
word, is transferring one of your already existing and practised reading strengths
to a new area that needs that strength.

Take non-linear notes, in many colours

Linear, sentence-based “neat” notes made in one colour (usually a blue, black or
grey) are the kind of notes that virtually everyone in the world has been taught to
make at school and in business. But these types of notes are exactly the opposite
of what the brain needs.
To tune in, switch on, open up, and stay alert, it’s better to use a mind map –
in which you start with a central image of a subject in the middle of a page, and
branch out, much like the tentacles of an octopus. A mind map can summarise in
one page what normal notes may take 20 pages to cover.

Remember – high reading speeds are possible

“Normal” reading speeds are at a low level because once we have been taught
how to recognise the letters of the language in which we are learning to read, little
else is ever added to our skill base.
But by taking in large groups of words per fixation and by “hanging around”
on the words you are reading for shorter periods of time, you and your eye-brain
system can comfortably reach speeds of 1,000 words per minute, or more.
Again, if you think about it, your eye-brain system is able to take in,
instantaneously, entire vistas in a split second. If it can do these feats in a split
second, then it can take in a couple of pages of print in an entire minute.
John F Kennedy regularly read the material presented to him at over 1,000wpm.
And recently, the six-time world speed reading champion, Anne Jones, read the
entire new Dan Brown book, just before its publication, in well under an hour,
smart with excellent comprehension – an average speed of well over 2,000wpm!
living So, aim high – challenge Anne at the next World Speed Reading Championship!