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.
Today, Google launched its eBookstore. Previously rumored to be called “Google Editions” it has officially launched as Google eBooks. With over three million titles, it’s the largest ebooks collection in the world, a digital Library of Alexandria.
You can buy a book from the Google eBookstore and store it digitally in the cloud, allowing you to take it anywhere you go. You can start reading on your desktop at home and continue reading later in the day from your phone, laptop, iPad – pretty much any device with an internet connection. The open standard doesn’t lock you into a specific device. This will surely lead to a greater adoption of eBooks, a trend that really started to accelerate when Amazon released its Kindle.
For all of us avid readers out there the outside world poses a great threat in the form of distractions. Whether they are pleasant or annoying, distractions will always get one simple goal accomplished – they will make your job of finishing whatever it is you are reading a daunting task.
Distractions may vary in shape, size and form, but rest assured, they will follow you even to the North Pole if you decide to make it a reading retreat. Some distractions are easy to spot, while others hide under an impenetrable disguise, so that you don’t even recognize them as such. We decided to list the most dangerous of them for you, so that if you ever become victims to these ugly creatures, at least you do so very well informed.
You probably have some books you don’t need. And there are probably some books you don’t have. So why not check out the Chicago Reader’s Book Swap on April 22.
Iris will be featured at the event. We’ll be raffling off a few seats to our speed reading classes, and you’ll get a bookmark with any book that you find (because you can never have enough bookmarks now, can you?).
Bring your books! Take some books! Meet other people that love reading books!
Steve Jobs definitely knows how to put on a show. Apple unveiled their newest creation, the iPad yesterday. Aside from being a very nicely designed tablet computer, Apple’s iPad will also serve as an e-book reader.
Apple’s entry into the e-book market is a direct challenge the Amazon’s Kindle which has dominated the e-book market over the past couple years. Now it looks like Amazon has some catching up to do.
Apple’s iPad works like a regular computer. You can browse the internet, listen to music and read books. You can think of it as an entertainment hub. Amazon’s Kindle is a more simplified device. The Kindle basically only does one thing, but it does it really well. It allows you to read books on the go. The Kindle makes it very easy to get books from Amazon’s store (wirelessly with no internet fee). (more…)
This post will be part of a series I will try to do every day on cool websites and applications that I find. Most of these will be reading or productivity related with an occasional divergence to something completely random.
Earlier this week I came across, ReadBag.com. This is a great website if you do a lot of reading online. If you’re like me, and do a lot of reading online, sometimes you don’t have the time to read everything in one sitting. You might resort to bookmarking the link in your browser, emailing it to yourself or adding it to some social bookmarking site.
Readbag.com puts nifty spin on bookmarking while making it ridiculously easy. Below is a quick demo I did to show you some of the cool features.
Know of any other cool websites for readers? Let us all know by commenting on this post.
-Paul-
