| Speed Reading to Combat Stress |
Speed Reading to Combat Stress
For many people, dealing with a stack of unread books, newspapers, magazines,
journals, and correspondence is synonymous with dealing with stress. In this
Information Age, it is no small wonder that those who make promises such as
"Read 10,000 words per minute or more!" have a sizable market segment and
will not suffer from a shortage of customers anytime soon.
Opinions on the veracity of claims made by speed-readers vary. On the one hand,
supporters of the claims like to point out that two former American presidents,
John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, were both active proponents of speed reading.
On the other hand, one well-known skeptic offers the following words of
advice: "Those desiring to increase the speed of their reading would do better
to enroll in a community college course devoted to building study skills,
vocabulary, and reading comprehension. It would cost them less, and they would
not end up wasting their time trying to read 10 lines at a time, backward and
forward."
Of course, it would be awfully remiss of an article on speed reading to leave
out the quip attributed to the wonderful Woody Allen: "I took a speed-reading
course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It involves Russia."
No matter your stance on the credibility of speed-reading claims, having any
kind of strategy for devouring your reading material is surely better than
having none. We will cover a few of the common speed-reading techniques and
discuss some ideas for taking your reading more seriously. If you are a rather
average reader, using these techniques and ideas should enable you to at least
double your reading speed over time. Even the modest goal of going from 200
words per minute to 400 words per minute would certainly be better than nothing
and would halve the time of your reading, a considerable improvement to your
stress-filled life.
Let us start with arranging your reading material. There is a saying about how
eating a live frog at the start of the day would make the remaining worries of
the day seem trivial in comparison. When it comes to reading, it helps a lot to
start with the most tedious or monotonous material first. Get that out of the
way so that your reading becomes progressively easier and less taxing on your
mental faculties. Non-fiction is usually always going to come before fiction,
unless you are pulling a Woody Allen with Tolstoy and such.
When reading books, you can often get a sense of the bigger picture by reading
the table of contents, the first and last paragraphs of all chapters, the
headings and subheadings, and the diagram captions. Chunking up in this way
allows your mind to structure the material into a logical and coherent whole.
This makes it easier to assimilate the finer points as you move along. It also
gives you an early warning for books that are going to waste your time -- how
many times have you read the first five or six chapters of a book, only to find
the author going all over the place from the seventh?
Now for a few speed-reading techniques. We will mention several ones that you
can use immediately. First, you may or may not find that using a ruler, pen, or
finger to carry your eyes along the page increases reading speed. Second,
eliminate regression or back-reading: try to develop the habit of continuous
movement forward, without going back over words you have just read. Finally,
eliminate subvocalization: some courses state that silencing the inner
reading voice allows for higher reading speeds.
If you have a problem seeing books through to completion, with the final result
being a stack of unfinished books, one effective idea is to limit yourself to a
small selection of books at any one time. You then cycle through this small
selection and do not begin another book until you have a slot in your selection
space. Imposing a limit on yourself in this way strikes a balance between the
freedom of parallel reading and the discipline of focused reading.
It would be to your benefit to investigate the possibility of obtaining audio
versions of the books you have to read. That way, you can catch up on your
material while you are waiting in congested traffic, walking the dog, or dozing
off to sleep. Listening to those pleasant narrator voices can be a soothing
form of stress relief in itself.
Happy reading.
PPPPP
Word Count 744
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