This book is quite light to read. I finished reading it in 1.5 hour in one sitting! I read off from Scribd, but according to Amazon, the physical copy of the book is 134 pages, so I guess I failed to finish this one within the suggested timeframe by the title of this book. 😛
Anyways below is just my brief summary of the book. Although I listed out all the key points and they may appear easy, I definitely recommend you to check out and read the book by yourself. The book went further in-depth explaining why these techniques work.
Book info from goodreads => https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42428073-speed-reading.
Section 1: Pre-reading
- Write down the purpose of the book. (e.g. Why do you pick it up?)
- Preview (note: I find reading table of contents generally gives a good-enough overview of the book)
- Change of reading speed: slow down for unfamiliar concepts and speed up when it’s familiar to you. Avoid the pitfall of speeding up: assume the author meant your way while he/she meant another.
Section 2: Speed reading techniques
- Whitespace technique: Look at spaces between words or line
- Chunking: Read by chunk (a more advance technique that instead of breaking it by whitespaces, it’ll be breaking the sentence down by reasonable phrases)
- Note: Only choose whitespace or chunk technique! It’s not recommended to use both.
- Don’t subvocalize words that you see
Section 3: Enhancing the techniques
- Shorten the time on fixation (e.g., the time spent on a word or phrase) and just flow through
- Avoid regression (i.e., re-reading previous sentences and go backward)
- Visual range: Widen range to read by line with peripheral to go top-down from the middle down instead of with left-right-down eye movement
- Schulte table
- Raining letters
Schulte table | Raining letters |
---|---|
Section 4: Improving Comprehension
- Focus on the main point and don’t dabble on details
- Find the topic sentence
- Build vocab
- Circle unfamiliar words
- Thesaurus
- Audiobooks
- Prefix-subfix
- Talk to people with strong vocab
- Study vocab with apps or games
Prefix | Subfix |
---|---|
Section 5: Additional Tips
- Recall and review to memorize better
- Visualize
- Eye-care & eye exercises (note: I like how the author concluded the book with eye health lol)
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