[Book] Speed Reading: Learn to Read a 200+ Page Book in 1 Hour

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
img_0402 img_0403

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)