speed reading tips, techniques and how-to

Speed Reading Comprehension - Fit Your Reading to the Moment

There is one rule of pleasure reading which can be adapted to business reading. An adult should never read anything in which he is not sufficiently interested to pursue with zest. That is the rule of cultural and pleasure reading. Plainly it cannot be literally carried over into your business office. For you often must read reports that merely irritate you, proposals from salesmen which you know you will turn down before you finish the first hundred words, and such things. But this much is possible.

Read Only What Bears Vitally on Your Most Pressing Tasks from Hour to Hour, Avoid Miscellaneous and Random Reading. Learn to Look Up in Good Books and Magazines and Reference Works New Facts Which May Give You a Broader Basis of Judgment and Action in the Immediate Affairs of Your Office.

What does this really mean? It means that you must relate your reading as intimately as possible to your hourly interests and duties. Then you will read at your best, for your whole "set of mind/' as well as your active interest and your desire to know things, will tune in with the words you scan.

Above all, it means that you must avoid reading in fixed daily doses and at fixed daily hours and in fixed books or magazines. This instantly puts books into the class with castor oil and early morning exercises. They taste like medicine, and you come to them with a wry face.

Speed Reading Comprehension - Apply What You Learn as You Read

If you will make it a rule to read only what bears on some immediate business interest, you will automatically tend to apply what you read to this interest. And this will prove ideal.

Probably, though, you may have to drill yourself a little in making such applications, especially when reading something that bears only remotely or somewhat indirectly on your practical affairs. Here we can give you no rule of procedure except the very simple one:

As You Read, Stop Every Few Minutes and Ask Yourself the Question: "How Does All This Bear on Me and My Affairs?"

The more systematically you do this, the more easily will you remember what you read, in so far as this is worth while, and dismiss all else as irrelevant.

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