10 Days To Faster Reading
Attendance: Chris, Harry, Justin, Nathan.
Overview
This book is designed to help your everyday untrained average reader learn skills that will improve his or her reading ability. It guides you sequentially through different techniques that enhance your reading skills and it has exercises and tests to try a long the way.
Commentary
Everyone seemed to enjoy this book quite a bit. I know that I did. Now I have skills that are going to help me keep up with all of the reading I plan to do without killing myself to do it. As far as discussion goes, it was very straightforward. The whole point of the discussion was not really to help anyone gain any new insight on the material, but just to activate another part of the memory to help remember the contents.
Because the goal of the discussion to commit the material to memory, I simply asked a series of questions that took us through the book. This resulted in lots of flipping through the book and reviewing the different concepts outlined within. I actually used the opportunity to finally take notes on the big post it flip chart paper.
Many people are at first skeptical of this book. But after reading it, I can truthfully say it has been very useful to me. I can now easily keep up with the reading that this group will require.
For me, the most useful techniques were:
1) Previewing — This technique is fantastic. It is basically a method of trying to find the authors outline so you can quickly go through a book or chapter and get the main points. I have really started doing this a lot.
2) Using a notecard as a pacer – This helps assure that you are not wasting eye movements looking back up at what you previously read, or trying to find your place. It also makes you keep up a constant pace.
3) Looking for Keywords – This method basically boils down to “read the big words.” Most smaller words add very little content to a sentence, and the meaning of the sentence can be derived from the bigger words. By training yourself to look for the bigger words you can cut down on about half of the words you are reading.
There are many more techniques in this book, and exercises to go along with them. The exercises were all easy and very helpful to practice the material. My reading skills have definitely improved as a direct result of this book. Unless you are already a really good reader, it is worth your time.
