Paul Nowak is the Founder of Iris Reading. He has taught speed-reading skills to thousands of students and professionals in major cities throughout the U.S. He has been a guest speaker at numerous institutions that include the University of Chicago, Harvard and Stanford.
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The Chicago Ideas Festival has just wrapped up and we’d like to share this thought-provoking debate that happened in Chicago last week: Do Too Many People Go To College? Let us know what you think in the comments…
Comprehending what you read better comes easy one you know the mechanics of how you comprehend. In my post Reading Comprehension Strategies, I cover in detail the mechanics of how reading comprehension works. I highly recommend you check it out fist prior to moving on to this tip.
The Tip: Read the first sentence of every paragraph prior to reading the article in it’s entirety.
As simple as this sounds, this technique is very effective for improving your reading comprehension. The first sentence in every paragraph is called the “topic sentence”. In the formal academic paragraph, it is the most general of all sentences and contains within it, the most relevant information about the paragraph’s contents. By taking the time to read the first sentence of each paragraph prior to reading the entire article, you will learn a great deal about the article’s contents. When you then read the article, you will comprehend it better.
This little tip is a spin on the truth that if you read an article twice, you will comprehend it better. That’s however a very time consuming task and won’t help you in your overall reading speed. If you read the first sentence of very paragraph, you will be able to enjoy the same benefits of reading it twice but in a fraction of the time. Give it a shot and post your feedback, thanks for reading!
More people today are interested in Speed Reading then ever before! I believe that this interest has a strong relationship to the volume of information that has become available thanks to the power of the internet. I recently joined in to make a contribution to this information pool by starting my own Speed Reading blog, based on my knowledge and insights of the subject in the hopes of helping people all over the world take in information faster. All this being said, I get asked one question a lot as an instructor by friends and just about everyone that knows about the Speed Reading classes I teach for Iris. It is…
What is the number one step I can can take right now to read faster?
Is there really a way to teach someone how to read faster with one simple step?
Yes there is and today I want to share it with you. If you follow this one step that I am going to share, you should at least notice an immediate 20% increase in your reading speed. With practice, you will break well beyond that barrier. All it takes is time and practice.
Use your finger or a pen as a guide to assist you while you read. Consider the pen or your finger as a guide to focus your awareness. Without having a guide to zone in on our focus, we can easily end up reading very inefficiently resulting in a huge loss of speed. If you use a guide like your finger or a pen, you can not only increase your focus on reading, you can also push yourself to read a little faster. It is to my estimate that most of us without any formal training on Speed Reading, already have the ability to read 20% faster just by using a guide to focus our awareness.
How to you do it properly?
Use your finger to hover under the word you are reading. Allow your finger to move a little faster then you normally would read and let it be your guide as you go from line to line, focusing on the word above your finger. It is very simple yet very effective. One of our major problems today is lack of focus. Lack of focus will cause you to read slower. By using your finger or a pen, you not only increase your focus, you also maintain it for longer periods. Also, you can increase your reading speed by simply moving your guide a little faster then you normally read.
Will you always have to read with your finger or a pen going forth?
No, with practice you will be able to maintain most of the speed without using the guide. When I started Speed Reading, I used my finger as a guide a lot and kept practicing every time I read. Eventually, I found that I was able to read almost as fast without the guide. I still use the guide when I feel that I am lacking focus or if I would like to improve my speed even more. When you read with a guide, you train yourself to focus and read faster. Once you have trained yourself, you will be able to read fast without the guide.
But what about reading on a computer screen? Do you still use a guide?
I recommend Accelareader when reading material on a computer. You won’t need your finger at all because Accelareader will take your text and display it one word at a time so you only have to focus on one spot. Just follow the instructions on the Accelareader site and enjoy reading on a computer like you have never done before. In an upcoming post, I will show you how to use Accelareader with great detail to read faster and also improve your reading comprehension. It is a great free tool and I highly recommended that you check it out!
So there it is, the simplest yet most effective step you can take right now to improve your reading speed. We cover this in our workshops along with other techniques to help you read even faster. We also teach our students how to comprehend the information better and retain it longer with special techniques and strategies. The goal of our workshops is to help you read faster, comprehend more and retain information longer. I highly recommend that you take advantage of one of our workshops if you are ready to improve your reading speed, comprehension and retention. Thanks for reading this post, if you have any questions, please post a comment below and I will respond back as soon as I can. You can also e-mail directly me at joe@irisreading.com.
How many new Web Pages have you opened today? 10? 15? May be 50? How much time did you spend on it before you hit the Back button? Since the majority of reading is now done on the computer screen, it has become easier to track how much time we spend on pages and how much we actually read?!
Check this Out:
Harald Weinreich* and his team supplied 25 users’ browsers and recorded extended information about their normal Web activities. This study is completely naturalistic and users weren’t asked to do anything specific.
If we take an online page it usually will contain some images, some text (on average 593 Words) and navigation tools.
. Clearly, we don’t read every single second while we stay on the page, instead we spend time understanding the layout, figuring out navigation as well as looking at images. Harald Weinreich did not perform an eye tracking research but we can’t say how much time exactly his participants were reading, but it will compensate for the fact that his users had above-average intelligence, with several being university employees. In the table below you can see that with the increase of words on the page, the amount of time readers spend on the page increases.
However, for each extra 200 words of text, users stayed on the page for only 8 additional seconds. Too bad for us (writers).
In reality, users will ONLY read 20% of the text! It’s a good thing to keep in mind while coming up with an article or a web-page, but how can you benefit from this knowledge?
Imagine if you could read 2-3 times faster than an average person? Do you think it will help you grasp twice as much information in the same amount of time?
In fact, your table will look like this:
We stayed on the safe side and simply doubled the speed from 250 WPM to 500 WPM, but it’s not unusual for our graduates to triple their current speed after the class.
You would be able to spend the same amount of time on the page and cover far more material, consequently have more thorough knowledge and have a better understanding of the material. You will be going back to the window less often!
Since everybody else around you is only covering 20% of the material, it’s so easy to be ahead of the game. You can spend the same amount of time on the page as you were spending and get twice more value. You will cover more quality information that will stay and may be get a promotion that you always wanted! Being able to read faster helps you achieve more with less effort and time.
Which fits your information needs? Please leave your comments below.
I will also promise to keep my word count diet and finish my blog by congratulating you on getting through the article. You can now award yourself with the title of a Persistent Reader!
*Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer: “Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use,” in the ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 2, no. 1 (February 2008), article #5.
After having taught for the Iris organization for the last year and speaking to many students about the huge amount of information available on Speed Reading, it is very clear that there is a hand full of myths that exist surrounding the effectiveness of Speed Reading. In this post I would like to cover the three biggest myths surrounding the subject based on what is brought to my attention by my students and my own research.
1. Reading faster will lower comprehension. It’s very easy to understand why this myth exists. By simply trying to read fast without understanding the mechanics behind how we read, we will notice a sharp decline in comprehension. But however, when we take the time to understand what causes us to comprehend information, we can then revamp our reading style to become more effective. This allows us to not only read faster, but increase our ability to comprehend the information better. The mechanics of comprehension are covered in detail within my article Reading Comprehension Strategies.
2. It will be hard to retain the information if you speed read. This is very similar to myth #1. Our style and knowledge of how retention works or what I like to call, “retention technology”, needs to be revamped before we can gain the benefit of improving retention. In our classes we cover reading strategy. There are many things that can be done to improve retention such as Mind Mapping. Just like myth #1, we really need to dig into the mechanics of retention before we attempt to learn how to read faster. After all, we do want to make sure that we retain the information as long as possible.
3. Speed Reading involves skipping words and is therefore not effective for studying or reading non-fiction material. When you improve your reading speed, comprehension and retention ability, there will be no need to skip over words. This myth derives from the truth that you should skip over what I like to call “filler words”. These are words put in by the author for grammar reasons. It is however not encouraged that you skip over any other words. There are many words and phrases in non-fiction or study materials that have important information to aid in comprehension and we DO NOT want to skip over them. There are strategies for being able to read faster with study or non fiction material which we cover in our classes. The goal is to increase speed, comprehension and retention. Knowing the difference between filler words and words that carry more meaning, is essential for improving reading speed for study materials. Again, this myth only rings true if we do not take a strategic approach towards reading.
After studying Speed Reading for over ten years, I tend to forget that these myths exist until they are brought to my attention by my students. These myths exist due to lack of understanding behind the mechanics of reading. The good news is that in the last few years, I have found that there is a lot more emphasis put on taking in information at a higher rate. More and more people are looking for a strategic approach towards reading rather then the more traditional style. Understanding the mechanics of reading allows us to come up with better reading strategies. Traditional reading style causes us to plateau on speed, comprehension and retention. The secret to reading faster is to read with strategy in mind. It is in my opinion, the single most important bit of information that I teach in my classes. It is a bit of a paradigm shift but it us required if we want to read faster, comprehend better and retain information longer. Thank you for reading my post, if you have any questions or comments please leave it below and I will be more then happy to answer.
Whether you’re the CEO of a multinational, or the department intern, you qualify as a business professional. Needless to say, that title entails the possession of a broad set of skills that includes leadership, communication, practical knowledge, and yes–reading. Reading may not seem like a significant part of your day-to-day work. You may have abandoned the notion of reading with the concluding chapter of your college textbooks. Quite the contrary, in fact. If you are a serious player in the competitive job market of today, you already know that simple tasks that may not seem to take up much of your time actually eat up more of it than you’d think. But you already knew that. You’re a clever professional. You know that cutting down on time spent doing menial labor–like reading–means more time doing work that relates directly to your job. More …
Growing up, people like Aesop, Big Bird, and our parents gave us life lessons we lived by till this very day. “Choose a career you enjoy”, “You don’t have to get along with everyone”, and “Slow and steady wins the race” may all sound eerily familiar to you. However, it’s time to realize that while these aphorisms struck gold during childhood, adulthood is all about being productive. And being productive follows a whole other set of golden rules. So it’s time to forget what you learned about success all those years ago and relearn the fundamentals of productivity as they apply to you now. More …
2011: a year full of promise and positive changes. However, it seems to be that no matter how cutting-edge technology is nowadays, no laptop, smartphone application, or hand-held device can break the cyberspacial wall of impossibility. Some tasks just simply can’t be done by technology alone. But this is for a good reason. Technology is there to aid us–to help users adapt, organize, develop, share, edit, communicate, and perfect their work. It’s a tool to help our feeble, bumbling human minds remember and carry out our tasks at the next level. Nevertheless, it’s a tool that most of us 21st Centuryists can’t live without. Having said that, I’d like to introduce you to a slew of neat widgets from Google. They’ve been around for some time now, but in case you haven’t had a proper introduction, meet Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Fast Flip, and Google Tasks. All of these programs are intended to be used for better communication, organization, collaboration, and much more. More …
Paul Nowak is the Founder of Iris Reading. He has taught speed-reading skills to thousands of students and professionals in major cities throughout the U.S. He has been a guest speaker at numerous institutions that include the University of Chicago, Harvard and Stanford. 
