Speed-Reading Myths
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I first learned reading quickly about five years ago for the purpose of training it to a young, eager group of sixth graders in a summer school study abilities course. I noticed without delay upon arriving that I would must locate fresh ways of motivating them, so I asked them what forms of stuff they would be interested in learning. The overwhelming topic of choice was speedreading, so I read a couple of books on the topic, took a weekend long course, and in due time greater my speed reading abilities to around 2,000 words per minute on an easy 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 training course of the next two years, I wrote numerous articles on the topic which sooner or later transformed itself into my site.
Doing more and more study on this topic, although, I discovered, of all stuff, a skeptics website saying that reading quickly was a scam.
I don't assume it must come as any surprise that I am an ardent supporter of learning tricks to read more rapidly, but after reading what this website, and many others just like it, had to say on the subject, I started to see where they were coming from.
You see, speedreading is a fairly completely new concept. The first individual to use the phrase was Evelyn Woods in the ninteen sixties, an Australian teacher who identified a number of bad reading patterns and at some point in the not to distant future started training correspondence courses and holding seminars where she taught her methods, most of which are continue to well accepted and taught today.
In the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, Howard Stephen Berg is the person listed as the fastest reader in the world, where he claimed to be allowed to read over 80 pages of writing in one minute, a reading speed of about 25,000 wpm (words per minute). Once you get to this step, I started to understand the skeptics.
Once you begin to look into the record, you will see that the officials at Guinness, at the time, weren't famous for verifying the records they posted, and this was, in accepted fact, not a record that they checked. They took Berg at his word, and it seems that he altogether invented the number. When asked to verify his claims, he's hit or miss. There are a lot of television applications that he has appeared on where he demonstrates near perfect recall and splendid 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 might be just slightly all together better than half of his suggest 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. |
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Author Resource:-
Today's reading fast champion, Anne Jones, was tested and verified as having read 4,700 words per minute with a 67% understanding rate. Berg and additional similar speed reading gurus who imply to read at twice that level are not able to reach even this low a level of understanding, and in evidence, are only able to find the barebones outline or the topic matter of what they read.
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By :
Melda Thalacker
Submitted
2011-09-04 07:45:51 |
Article From Article Mayhem
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