Read Faster, Retain More With Speed Reading

Regardless of your current ability to read and comprehend, a good speed reading program can help you improve your reading speed. And at the same time you can maintain or improve your comprehension skills.

With a speed reading program, people learn to rapidly scan the reading material. They are taught to ignore irrelevant information and pick out only the pertinent parts. The goal is to read complete sentences as a single unit rather than focusing on each word in order to pick up the gist of the reading material.

In particular, technical materials can be difficult to read, and they often run to a thousand pages or more. Speed reading can help people get through them faster while retaining the important information. This is very useful, because if they can't remember a large portion of what was read, they might have to read it all over again.

When kids are learning to read, they are taught to read a single word and say it out loud to help retain recognition. They then do the same with each word that follows. And as they get older, they continue to use this rather inefficient way of reading. But a speed reading program can retrain the brain to learn a better, faster way to read.

The first speed reading program was developed and introduced in Australia by Evelyn Woods in 1958. Since then, learning to read faster has become extremely popular, especially when it comes to reading informational text.

There are many different techniques available in a speed reading program. They are all designed to help participants learn to read faster. But some critics claim that many of the courses only help to achieve faster reading while reducing the comprehension rate. The speediest readers can plow through a couple thousand words in just an hour, as demonstrated in speed reading competitions. On the other hand, their comprehension rate is about 50 percent.

This is considered by some to be an essential component of a speed readng course that is lacking in many programs. They measure their success based solely on speed instead of comprehension and retention. This is highly important, of course, especially when it comes to technical content.

When looking for a speed reading program to improve your reading speed, look for one that can improve comprehension and retention, along with speed. As you start to use your new abilities, you'll discover that it's a lot faster to get what you need from any book or manual.