Papa Rodin Reads - "The Speed Reading Book" by Tony Buzan

in #review6 years ago (edited)

Greetings, my fellow Steemians and Steemettes!

I love to read. Ever since I have been small, if I had something fun and interesting to read, I would bury my nose between the pages. That being said, I never felt like I was particular good or bad at reading. I just enjoyed it. A while back, I had a chat with a friend of mine. We talked about the topic of "speed reading" that I have never ever got in touch with until then. He actually owned the book that I will be talking about today. I skimmed through it and was interested, so I decided to give it a go and got it for myself. As the cover I will show gives away, I read the book in German.


The Preface

When I started reading the book, I found that the preface isn't actually written by the author himself but by a woman who goes by the name of Anne Jones. She talks a bit about the topic of speed reading in general and the history of the book. The big eye catcher in these first few pages was her claim that she read the last book of the Harry Potter Series in less than an hour which would imply reading speeds of around 4000 words per minute. The average reader manages to read between 200-300 words per minute while students who read a lot even make it to 400. That being said, 4000 wpm sounded enormous and in my mind, I thought that such speeds have to take a toll on your reading comprehension. According to her, she was still able to answer questions about the book in depth afterwards.

Needless to say that after reading these pages, my curiosity was very much in tune with my skepticism and I was eager to keep on reading.

Testing my Skills

The book isn't very hard to read and the Author writes in a fairly excited, personal way that is easy to the eye. It feels more like actually listening to someone talk to you than just reading instructions, which I can enjoy. The Author actually asked some questions which I had to answer in form of some quizzes which weren't actually important but helped putting my own viewpoints on reading, speed reading and its possibilities into perspective. I went at it quite open and found that I apparently wasn't open enough. The Author had great confidence in himself and his teachings and did his best to share that confidence with me. How very nice of him, wouldn't you agree?

Armed with all this confidence and years of reading experiences, I started to do the first reading exorcise which had the goal of figuring out my initial reading speed. Thanks to many years of reading experience, I completed the test and found out that I was an average reader. I had around 275 wpm with a decent enough reading comprehension of around 90%. A bit humbling, I was actually thinking to be a bit faster, but it is good to know where you stand.

Reconstruction

Right after this initial test, Tony went on and shared a couple of easy to apply ways that can help you increase your reading speed within minutes. Shortly after, the next test wasn't too far away and I applied everything that I have learned so far and, to my surprise, I actually managed to drastically increase my reading speed to around 500 wpm. My reading comprehension dropped to around 80%, but that wasn't a concern for me, I was excited. Just a few minutes into the book and I already doubled my reading skill while not having lost too much comprehension? I was hooked! And very eager to read on, let me tell you.

Looking at this sudden change in performance, I thought back to Anne Jones. That woman has been doing what I just started to learn for years. Suddenly, her 4000 wpm did not sound too far fetched anymore. As everything, speed reading is a skill and practice makes perfect. There is also the topic of me realizing that I was reading the book in German, which is important because the German language has a couple more nuances and different words to it. As an example, where the English speaking man would just say "the", I as a German have to deal with words like "Der", "Die" or "Das". Knowing that, I wagered that I could potentially reach even higher reading speeds than the one I just managed in my second test if I apply these skills on English text.

Another topic that came to mind was that this Anne Jones person claims to love the Harry Potter Universe, which I considered to be a helpful factor as well. Having a basic understanding about the topic you are reading about is a great help in comprehending a text you are reading whereas the tests I did so far where about topics I had no history of any kind with.

All of these are fancy words for saying that I was starting to come around. My initial skepticism started to wafer and excitement took place.

What does the book entail?

The book contained a couple of different ways and tools that help you become a better, faster and more efficient reader. I will go into some of these. There were also a couple of exercises that have the aim of improving all skills that are involved for this. Of course, there were also more tests that help you track your progress.

So how does one actually speed read?

1. Create proper reading surroundings.

Pretty basic stuff that nobody ever really respects. The right place, the right time, good lighting, no distractions, taking care of proper posture is important for performance and health.

2. Stop vocalizing

A lot of people, me included, tend to vocalize what they are reading, either by moving their lips or doing so in their mind. This is discouraged because it wastes time for next to no benefit.

3. Stop going back

Unconsciously, readers jump back to certain words they have already read for different reasons, double checking whether they understood or read something correctly. This of course takes time as well and in most cases isn't necessary. The brain either did pick up what you read, if not absolutely consciously, at least subconsciously to a degree and in many cases, things also get clearer as one just continues to read on.

4. Using a reading aid

I really enjoyed this part because it goes in tandem with something I really enjoy doing in my free time: Ranting about how we never learned to actually learn properly. Buzan goes to say that using a tool as a reading aid to sets your focus on the page you are reading while also helping with setting the pace is one of the most powerful things one can do to better reading skills. And I agree with that. And it goes entirely against what people get taught in school. We get discouraged of following the lines we are reading with our fingers or pens or pages and are supposed to start reading freely as soon as possible.

It is much easier to go over a page having something to focus on than doing it freely for reasons Buzan helps you understand in the book quite nicely.

I actually used an eating stick I still had lying around. It was long and thin, which was important because of the next point.

5. Using my peripheral Vision

Buzan strongly suggest that when it comes to reading, the peripheral vision is heavily underutilized. We are focuses on very small word groups, sometimes similar words in single lines even though our eyes are capable of taking in more words than that, even across lines. It takes a bit of time and practice for getting used to that, but his is where the reading aid really comes in handy.

How did it go for me?

I had quite a lot of time when I got my hands on this book and started to re-read a couple easy to digest books in order to practice and had mixed results. As with any skill, challenge brings progress, so I tried different reading speeds in order to find out how well I would do, with mixed results. Obviously, the faster I went the less I was actually comprehending, but I did find that there was still a somewhat good balance in my favor. If I read a book with a speed of 1000 wpm compared to the average 250, that is four times faster. If I lose 10-30% of reading comprehension in the process, that is still good because I can make up for that loss by simply reading the book again at the same speed, which will still net me a profit. Knowing that this just gets better with practice also make me feel fairly optimistic about the whole matter.

Also, as I said above, I am living in Germany, thus, most books I own are actually German, so there might be even more room for improvement if I focus more on English books.

Sadly, because life ended up becoming a bit stressful around that time, I wasn't able to keep on practicing, but the basic things I wrote about in this post I still know and apply to the best of my ability and I full intend to make reading a daily habit again once I have settled down a bit. In a perfect world, I would want to read a book every day and post about it here and I am fairly sure that this is absolutely doable. If I succeed, you will find out.

That being said, I do suggest getting this book. The topic of speed reading is controversial and a lot of people have negative opinions about it, but in general, I can say that the book has been good for me and I can see the potential of not only reaching Anne Jones reading skills but also to surpass it.

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.

Thank you all for your loyalty and support.

Read more of Papa Rodin!

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Oh my god, what happened that made this Post explode like this all of the sudden!?

This is awesome and ridiculous and I don't know what to say other than thank you for everyone involved?!

Curie happened! I am surprised their trail message didn't come. It's something like this:

"Hi paparodin,
Your post has been upvoted by the Curie community curation project and associated vote trail as exceptional content (human curated and reviewed). Keep creating awesome stuff! Have a great day :)
LEARN MORE: Join Curie on Discord chat and check the pinned notes (pushpin icon, upper right) for Curie Whitepaper, FAQ and most recent guidelines."

I am actually the curator that proposed your post for curation. I found it fascinating. Curie is a manual curation platform that looks for great contents on the platform, round the clock; and rewards them... as stated in the above message.

Cheers! Keep creating :)

Well, in that case, thank you, Curie and everyone involved in the process? I truly and absolutly wasn't expecting this in this form, but man do I appreciate it!

And thanks to you in particular, @misterakpan for making that proposal!

Great work young man, this is quite an achievement in very short order for you having only been here on steemit two weeks. Congratulations. Not only do you speed read, you speed earn.

Appreciating your nice words, my friend!

This came really unexpected, but it definitively will keep me motivated and posting. Leaving money and things like that aside, it is just a very good feeling of seeing your work being recognized.

Exactly, you are a great addition to the community and get what it is about.

Can't wait to see how this will look a couple months into the future from now on.

Congrats on the great post and pickup!

Much appreciated, man. I still can't believe it.

You got a 12.50% upvote from @nado.bot courtesy of @paparodin!

Send at least 0.1 SBD to participate in bid and get upvote of 0%-100% with full voting power.

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