Speed reading

Learning is an activity which a civilised man indulges in till his last breath. Knowledge is limitless and books are their primary source as they have been for thousands of years. For one to even acquire the smallest portions of this knowledge one has to read. The faster one reads the more information he is able to acquire in the otherwise finite life of a human being. That is where speed reading comes in.

Speed reading in essence is the method of reading very fast while still maintaining the level of comprehension and retention when read at normal speeds. This is a method of reading developed by one Evelyn Wood in the 1950s. The principle of this lies in supression of subvocalisation as speed reading theory argues that one can only read as fast as he can vocalise those words; unless one’s reading is independant of vocalisation/subvocalisation i.e. ‘thinking aloud’. They say that with speed reading one can increase his speed to 400+ words per minute while not compromising information retention.

The above numbers are very important when one of the biggest problems I face is that there are so many subjects I want to read about that every gain I can made in the speed to acquire the information about the topic at hand is worth it. Plus if I can learn to speed read I can also read the various classic literary pieces which I have always wanted to read however cannot find to do so. It’s sort of trying to strike a balance between things I would like to read and the things I really want to read. Currently I am reading up on the topic and I kind of agree with some of the things I have read so far. Hopefully this will continue to be the case as I further read on the topic.

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