Improving Your Speed Reading
Speed reading memorization techniques range from simple improvement in comprehension to powerful photographic memory. When we understand how something works or the concepts behind a topic, it is always far easier to remember. When trying to memorize information, we do not try to remember the whole sentence, word-for-word, as it is written. We want to memorize only the key facts throughout the work and discard all the unnecessary information.
One cure for this is to stop reading and deliberately seek some distraction, then return to what you were reading with renewed attention. The important thing is to do something about it, not just tell yourself, as so many people do: I can’t concentrate. But if there is more work remaining to be done, make the rest period short. It is surprising how quickly you can refresh your mind by turning to something entirely different for a few minutes.
Speed reading helps, but it also has other potential issues and challenges because if we speed read a lot and spend our days soaking up information we eventually find our minds dreaming we are reading where our dreams often consist of us scanning a page of type, on a computer screen or in a book. Writers that use the computer a lot, as well as researchers that use a computer to read online research reports often have dreams of doing these things in their sleep. When I started out doing this speed reading test I started off with reading matter I was familiar with, and as I got better started doing it with more complicated reading matter as my confidence grew. Comprehension also suffers if the average Internet surfer is clicking from website to website reading half a paragraph here and half of one there.
Students thus, need to pick out facts quickly from the test and remember them, or harvest them from the text into noted to go over later; easier said than done. You see, while I was in college, I took 33 credits in one semester once, I had to go to two different schools to do this, and it nearly killed me. Such bills are still cooling from the press by the time the vote is needed.
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 7:21 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.