Study Smart

Reading Speed Myths I first learned speed reading about five years ago for the purpose of teaching it to a young, eager group of sixth graders in a summer school study skills class. I noticed immediately upon arriving that I may must find fresh ways of motivating them, so I asked them what forms of stuff they could be interested in learning. The overwhelming topic of choice was reading rapidly, so I read some books on the matter, took a weekend long class, and finally higher my reading speed to around 2,000 wpm (words per minute) on an extremely efficient piece of writing. I taught what I had learned to my students, and almost all out of those saw some prominent development in their reading capabilities, both speed and comprehension. Over the class of the next two years, I wrote a lot of articles on the matter which at some point in the near future transformed itself into my page. Doing more and more research on this matter, however, I came upon, of all stuff, a skeptics page claiming that speed reading was a hoax. I do not think it must come as any surprise that I am an ardent supporter of learning simple ways to read faster, but after reading what this blog, and many other sites similar to it, had to say on the issue, I started to see where they were coming from. You see, speed reading is a fairly new concept. The first person to use the term was Evelyn Woods in the Sixties, an Australian educator who identified a number of bad reading habits and at some point started educating correspondence courses and holding seminars where she taught her approaches, most of which are still well accepted and taught today. In the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, Howard Stephen Berg is the individual listed as the fastest reader in the world, where he claimed to be able to read over 80 pages of content in one minute, a reading speed of about 25,000 wpm (words per minute). Next, I started to grasp the skeptics. Once you begin to look into the record, you'll see that the officials at Guinness, at the time, weren't well known for verifying the records they posted, and this was, in point, not a record that they checked. They took Berg at his word, and it seems that he completely invented the number. When asked to verify his claims, he's hit or miss. There are numerous television computer programs that he has appeared on where he demonstrates near perfect recall and amazing reading, but then there are also times, for instance, on his own product's informercials, where he reads 17 pages in twenty-four seconds, that could be only a little all together better than fifty percent of his imply of eighty pages in a minute. In the end, the missed opportunities for Berg started adding up, and in 1998, he had a lawsuit filed against him for deceptive advertising.

Author Resource:- Today's speed reading champion, Anne Jones, was experimented as and verified as having read forty seven hundred wpm (words per minute) with a 67% comprehension rate. Berg and other type of comparable speed reading gurus who claim to read at double that level aren't able to obtain even this low a level of comprehension, and in fact, are only able to discover the barebones outline or the subject matter of what they read.

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