speed reading tips, techniques and how-to

Speed Reading - Grasping the Essentials

In many instances, you need to gather only the main fact from what you read. The art of finding this differs considerably from the art of perceiving masses of detail. If all authors wrote well, it would be an easy art to teach. For then you would find the central thought clearly stated in the opening lines of the article. You would also find the major subdivisions indicated in a clear visual form throughout the text. Fortunately, most of our scientific and technical jour­nals are approaching this ideal - though some have still a long mile to travel. They adapt newspaper technique to their own special purposes.

A newspaper will outline a news item in three or four stages of completeness. The top headline will indicate the main event in the briefest possible phrase. The lower headlines will amplify this within 40 or 50 words. Then the lead paragraph will carry the story one degree further along. After that will come all the lesser details. The technical and scientific journal will do likewise, but in a more formal fashion. Here is a typical arrangement.
  1. The subject of the paper: usually stated in a short paragraph
  2. Details.
  3. Summary of facts.
  4. Conclusions reached from facts.
  5. Bibliography, if any.

One of the surest ways for you to improve your reading speed is to do what you can by way of persuading editors and book publishers to cast important material into some such readily comprehended form. This will save you hours in the course of every month. And it may even add more to your effective span of life than all the golf and motoring you do.

Use the Table of Contents and the Preface to Increase Reading Speed

You will usually save much time and come with greater ease to the essentials of a book, if you make it a practice to study its table of contents and preface with some care. Unfortunately some authors of serious books do not take their table of contents seriously enough. They do not aid their readers as they should in getting a bird's-eye view at the outset. Naturally you need make such a survey only when you are plunging into the entire book. When reading for a special topic, whose relation to the larger subject you know in advance, this method is needless.
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