Read Faster, Retain More With Speed Reading

Whatever your current reading skills are, a good speed reading program can teach you to read faster. As well, your comprehension abilities are maintained, and sometimes they even get better.

With a speed reading program, people learn to rapidly scan the reading material. They learn how to skip over the parts they don't need and focus on just the meaningful information. The idea is to be able to gather the essence of the material through reading entire sentences or phrases as a block, instead of just individual words.

In particular, technical materials can be difficult to read, and they often run to a thousand pages or more. Speed reading can help people get through them faster while retaining the important information. This is critical, since if they can't remember half of what they read, they may have to go back and read through it more than once.

When children first learn to read, they read a word and pronounce it out loud to be sure they recognize it. Then they move on to the next word. This methodical and slow moving process of reading is retained as time goes by. With a speed reading program, however, your brain can learn to read faster and more efficiently.

Speed reading programs were first introduced in 1958 by Evelyn Woods in Australia. In the years that followed, speed reading has taken on ever more popularity, in particular the ability to absorb lots of information.

There are many different techniques available in a speed reading program. All of these have been developed to help people improve their reading speed. Some naysayers, however, charge that some of these programs increase reading speed at the expense of comprehension. Some of the fastest readers, those who win competitive speed reading contests, can blaze through one or two thousand words per hour. On the other hand, their comprehension rate is about 50 percent.

This is considered by some to be an essential component of a speed readng course that is lacking in many programs. Their success is based only on reading speed without factoring in comprehension or the ability to retain the information. These are also quite important, in particular with regards to technical information.

If you're looking to find a good speed reading program, make sure it promises to help your understanding and ability to retain the material and not just teach you to read faster. By utilizing these skills, you'll be able to get what you need from any type of reading material.