Dear reader,
some readers have been
more or less waiting for this entry. I hope I can finally help you
now. I think that there is no “the one” method, to read fast or
faster. With this entry I'd like to share with you some thoughts and
introduce you to different approaches.
Some claim that it takes
longer to form words with the mouth than to just see them with the
eyes. I don't necessarily mean reading out loud with this. Also the
unconscious forming of words in your head take time.
Generally you should have
in mind what you want with the text and what you want to read it for.
I have my own method to read fast and created it out of different
ideas and suggestions. I don't know certain scientific words or
expressions for kinds of reading. I only want to share ideas that
helped me.
At university we had a
seminar about working scientifically, in which the teacher told us
that we should first check the headlines of a text for a first broad
overview. Of course with books the table of contents is naturally
helping with that. (With scientific texts or non-fictional writing, I
realised that a look at the last pages or respectively lines of the
text helps as well. Most good non-fictional books and scientific
books anyway, have a list of references, where you can see how up to
date the used literature is now. Depending on the topic I also like
to check if certain authors and their works have found their way in
or not.) The next good advice was, that the text immediately at the
pictures or graphs talk about them. So you could skip that text and
just look at the pictures and graphs and work them out on your own.
How much do you trust your
unconscious to help you with reading and being useful? Maybe you know
the following study already:
Depending on how well you
are with reading, it's easier or harder to unrevel this “letter
salad” of the study and reading it so it makes sense. Texts are
generally not a letter salad like that and so it's easier to take
those in then. At first it will be unfamiliar, but with experience
you'll take in more and will be able to take in the words faster.
Maybe it was similar for
you as it was at my primary school (“elementary school” for
American readers). We were told to put our finger under the line
respectively word we were just reading. For my method to read faster
I use the bookmark turn it horizontally under the line I'm currently
reading to go through it faster and not jump lines.
Some suggest to read a
certain part of the beginning of a line and a part at the end of the
line. Our brain would be able to sort of think up the middle part of
it. Whether or not it's true, I don't know. My thought about this
would be that with this method, I'd jump too much with my eyes.
Namely from the beginning to the end to the beginning to the end of
lines. My feeling tells me that a calmer movement of the eyes would
be more comfortable for me.
The magician Derren Brown
had a series years ago called “Trick or Treat”, in which he gave
the applicants a blind choice between a positive experience (trick)
or a darker one (treat). Glen Brighton is an ordinary man, who enjoys
taking part in pub quizzes. Derren Brown signed him up for a certain
one and wanted to prepare Brighton to make the first place. That
means, he has to read a lot and take knowledge in at a very short and
liminted time. For this Derren Brown lets him make a hand to a fist
and then stretch out the index finger and pinky. Glen Brighton is
only to concentrate on the area between the outstretched fingers. I
personally favour that sort of eye movement down the middle part of a
text, instead of concentrating on the beginning and end of a line.
Also it's probably more text to sense and take in that way.
I often use my bookmark in
the way described above to stay in the line I'm reading and not
explicitly reading every single word when going along that line with
my eyes. It's not reading as such, more a visually taking in the
words with the eyes. I guarantee you, that this method alone will
make you take in faster. Trust that you don't need to read every
single word exactly, to understand the content. You will notice
individual important words anyway. Trust that you don't need every
single detail, to understand the whole. Much like language teachers
at school talk about not needing to understand every single word in a
foreign language text or film. Start slow. Use the bookmark, like I
do or to start with use your finger for individual words. Go through
the line in a constant speed and take in the words without reading
exactly.
If you need or want
specific information from a text, be aware of the words. Have an
image of the word in your head. And then it's like with those
crosswords where there is seemingly letter salad in a square (German:
Quadrat) and you are to find given words horizontally or vertically
or whichever way. If you need to find the word “dog”, you don't
need to go through every line looking for “dog... dog... dog...”,
but look for “d” and if you've found a “d”, look around it
for an “o”. If that's not the case, go to the next “d”. If
it's got an “o”, look if it's followed by a “g”. That's
quick, because it's just a square Quadrat with few letters.
For a longer text with
sentences, it certainly makes more sense to search “bigger”. I'm
quite certain that if you were to look for a capital letter “q”
in the paragraph above, the word “Quadrat” will literally jump at
you, even just roughly scanning the paragraph. Check that paragraph
and trust your unconscious with that. The capital letter “Q” is
an unusual enough word within a sentence, even in English where “q”
is generally a more common letter than in German. But even if you're
looking for a less unusual “c”, like for example in “crosswords”,
you will find it within that paragraph. All you have to do is to have
in mind what the “c” looks like. Have an image of the small
letter “c” in your mind and do an image search. With a bit of
exercise in this, you can also search unknown texts for information,
even if it's not precisely in your head and irrelevant words vanish
from your conscious perception. That happens quite automatically,
just like when sometimes sometimes a word is written twice within a
text, and when you read it unconsciously, you don't notice, only when
someone points it out to you. Or did you notice that I wrote the word
“sometimes” twice in the previous sentence? If you want, write
that in the comments or also if those suggestions helped you.
Until next blog,
sarah
