Too much to read and not enough time is a common complaint of HR professionals. Francis Wilkins looks at how to avoid being ‘on the same page’ for too long
Too much to read and not enough time is a common complaint of HR professionals. Francis Wilkins looks at how to avoid being ‘on the same page’ for too long
Beforeyou go any further, think about how long it might take you to read this one article. A speed reader, someone who can read and comprehend more than 1,000 words per minute, would probably shoot through it in 45 seconds or less.
Speed reading, however, is not skim reading at the expense of comprehension. “Speed readers read for complete understanding,” according to Brainpower Training, organiser of a one-day course designed to develop the skill. “A reader who is speed reading has shifted from word-based reading to ideas-based reading. They are reading with the global processing area of the brain rather than the word recognition centre.”
While speed reading might traditionally be associated with hard copy written materials, it is a skill that can also be applied to reading on-screen, even though reading from a computer is still likely to be slower than reading from paper.
The Brainpower course identifies four poor reading habits, the correction of which will allow participants to increase their speed from a plodding average of around 200 words per minute (wpm) to up to six times that. Brainpower even offers a money back guarantee to students who don’t at least double their speed after attending the course.
Those four habits are: losing concentration (try reading a WorkChoices summary after too much coffee and four hours sleep); sub-vocalisation (sub-consciously ‘hearing’too many words in your head as you read); focusing hard on too few words (the brain needs to relax and the eye need to be trained so that it sees more words per fixation); and regression (flitting back to earlier words or sentences when reading text).
The course introduces several tools and techniques designed to address each of these habits. Developing a new habit, however, requires sustained repetition over time, and students are encouraged to do a speed reading exercise every day for the three weeks following the course to consolidate their newly discovered skills.
Losing concentration and sub-vocalisation can both be corrected by the faster input of information, which activates the whole brain. One of the course’s first exercises, designed to train the eyes to see more words per fixation and to stimulate brain cell connections, involved marking off four minutes’ worth of reading based upon a previously established comfortable reading rate. Participants are then required to read the same material in two minutes, effectively halving that last comfortable rate. While most feel themselves being rushed through in a mild state of panic, most also absorb more information than they had thought they would.
The two-minute read introduced a ‘pacer’, one of the key tools in learning to speed read. A pacer is a visual guide, usually a finger, which the reader runs across the page at the desired speed so that the eye will follow. Its use is designed to correct regression, as the eye has to follow and is not offered the opportunity to skip back to words that have already been scanned. When reading on screen, the mouse cursor can be used instead of a finger. A related tool is the sightline, the path that a pacer takes down or across the page, and participants are encouraged to explore different sightlines such as tracking diagonally back and forth or left to right, typewriter style, to discover which worked best for them.
The last poor reading habit, fixation, can be improved by what Brainpower calls ‘macroreading’. This involves rapidly scanning text – at 2,000 wpm for five minutes in the first macroreading exercise – and aiming to just get the gist of the material. A macroread works as warm up that will help a subsequent slower read when full comprehension is required. Scanning a book at 11 seconds per page, however, can be quite confronting for the rooky speed reader.
So, how did you go? If you got down to here in 45 seconds with full comprehension, you may be well placed to leave the office early or get on with your next task while your colleague is stuck in the mire of a company report. If not, becoming a speed reader is well worth considering.
For more information, contact Brainpower Training on 1300 661 555. Cost: $495 incl. GST per person; $445 incl. GST for full-time students; $890 incl. GST for groups of two, or any two workshops. For more prices and course schedules, visit www.brainpowertraining.com.au
