Tansel Ali

“Chunking When I was young, I was told to read word by word very carefully. While this was useful for the early stages of learning, it is counterproductive later in life. The ultimate purpose of speed reading isn’t actually to read fast: it is to form images of what you read. In essence, it is really reading in images. Let’s take a sentence: The big fat cat jumped over the large spiky fence. Reading this word by word, our brain processes ten words. Hypothetically, if every word took us one second to read, the above sentence would take ten seconds to read. Now let’s break the sentence into chunks. (The big fat cat) (jumped over) (the large spiky fence) In this instance, we have ‘chunked’ the words into three (bracketed) images. If it took you one second to read each ‘chunk’ or image, the sentence could now be read in three seconds. This is more than three times faster than reading word by word! And you still read every word. In order to apply chunking, we apply it to a minimum set of words. To begin with, start by taking three words at a time. How to chunk:   1. Place your reading guide in the middle of the three words (i.e. beneath the second word). 2. Instead of reading each word, look at them as a group and visualise an image for them.  ”
― Tansel Ali, The Yellow Elephant: Improve Your Memory and Learn More, Faster, Better