speed reading tips, techniques and how-to

Speed Reading - Reading for Relative Importance

You will never become a skilful reader unless you first cultivate a fairly keen sense of the relative importance of things. And this, alas, is something I cannot teach you in any wee volume like this one. It is, as a matter of fact, the quintessence of genuine education and culture.

I know a jolly professor of philosophy who reads his Sunday newspaper straight through, line by line, skipping
only some of the advertisements. Usually he finishes the j ob around Tuesday evening. Now a metaphysician may read thus, for to him all things are of almost equal importance. But nobody else dares to do so. We must pick and choose. We must budget our interests, as well as our time and our money. Otherwise we accomplish nothing.

The first stage in reading is to select what we ought to read and to discard everything else. To learn what is worth our while is a large part of the Art of Life. And here I must assume that you, as adults in a busy world, have mastered this task. What you may not have mas­tered as yet is the special application of your wants and needs to the printed page; that is, to the actual job of running your eye along the lines of type and picking out the useful.

To make your eye the servant of your will is the partic­ular aim of the present exercise in reading. You must come to the task with a clear will. Otherwise you will profit little.

When you pick up a newspaper or a magazine, you ought to glance through it in much the same spirit as you look over the immense display on large newsstands. Here you see printed matter about aviation, physical culture, engineering, retail merchandising, golf, tennis, interior decoration, and heaven knows what not. Does it ever occur to you to buy all these periodicals? Not if you are sane. You select from the mass a few which have some special interest to you.

So with the articles inside of any one of them. You must carry your selecting through to a finish here. In the first instance, you buy selectively in order to save your money. In the second instance, you ought to read selec­tively in order to save your time.

Time is far more important than money. Time is life. In the career of any well-regulated human being, one hour
ought to be worth a good many dollars. Whenever you dawdle over printed words which neither enlighten nor amuse you, you are partly committing suicide.

Many people are dead from the ears up because they are dying by the hour. And when you die, you die from the top down.
Back to Speed Reading Tips