I was a Bible college student when one of our chapels featured a
guest speaker who taught us how to speed-read. At the time I didn’t
need the skill since most collateral reading assignments in my courses
were under 500 pages, but I started practicing just for the fun of it
– sort of like a private parlor game. However all that changed when I
wound up in graduate school at Princeton Seminary and several Profs.
expected me to read several thousand pages of collateral along
with the five or six textbooks. That’s when I got serious about speed
reading. Here is the collection of what I practiced then, and picked up
since. The first thing I had to do was toss away the reading myths I
had held so long.
Reading Myths
1. Reading is linear. I had always figured reading was
a linear process; you know, start up front and grind through to the
very end in the exact order it was printed in. Reading is no more
linear than thinking is, (or I eventually discovered, than writing; few
writers start at the beginning — indeed, they usually “write the first
part last.”
2. True reading is word-for-word. I started as a kid
looking at individual letters. They didn’t help much. Next I started
sounding out syllables. Finally, I could read whole words. Why stop
with words? Well, I know one reason… I had a college professor who made
us swear we had “Read every single word” of our collateral reading.
Why? He didn’t make us swear we’d “read every single letter.” The
answer is simple: that professor (like me) had never moved from
letters, syllables, and words, to reading phrases, sentences and
paragraphs. He assumed the only way to read thoroughly was by the
laborious method of reading one word at a time.
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