Speed reading

Speed reading has its advantages but I don't think that reading more than one word at once will bring you any accomplishments, unless you are able to think very fast and digest much information in the one go. I think you could inquire into speed reading courses at your educational institution, if you were really interested.

True there's that possibility. I had a chance to do it this year and passed up on it. I'll give it a shot next year.

Anybody here been to a Speed Reading course? If so what was it like? Was it helpful?

Reading more than one word "at once" is an illusory concept. There is always one portion of text that comes before another so the sensation of it happening at once is relative (I don't care what Evelyn Wood says). In my inexpert opinion, the most useful technique for speed reading is to learn to read without internally vocalizing the words you are reading.

Oh okay that's very tough though. I tried it and I couldn't grasp onto the concept of things. I mean I lost my train of thought and couldn't put the story together properly.

I took speed reading in high school, and I think there's a misconception here. Speed reading doesn't involve "reading more than one word at once" -- it involves skipping words, learning to choose the important words of a sentence and skipping over the "unimportant" ones.

So if you were speed reading, the words that you actually read in the last sentence above would be, maybe, "Speed reading doesn't ... involves skipping, choose words skipping unimportant."

That's not really it, your brain fills in the rest so it makes sense. In my course we had an exercise. You cover all but the top line of your page with a piece of paper with a slit cut in it one line deep and as wide as the page, and pull the card down, exposing one line at a time. This forces you to read only forward, never looking back at the previous lines. As you progress, you pull the card down faster and faster... This supposedly teaches you to retain the words without backtracking, and you read faster.

But speed reading has fallen out of favor, I think. It was thought, years ago, that the comprehension level was the same as if you read slowly, but I've heard that although that's true right away, you retain your comprehension of the material longer if you don't force yourself to read as fast as you possibly can.

Also, speed reading of your leisure reading is just silly. The purpose of curling up with a good novel is just that -- the experience, not to finish the book in two hours or less.

True, unfortunately I don't enjoy read for leisure not unless if it's a topic I'm PARTICULARILY interested in. I'm more of a "learner" type and want to soak up as much info the most efficient way possible.