This may not be an overly long book to read, but it is very dense with information and the science behind learning how to improve your reading speed. It gives you the background in speed reading and the common claims and actual truths about it all. It lays out loads of different exercises and techniques to help you become a speed reader, whether that be for studies, work or just for pleasure. It will be especially useful for those wanting to speed up their reading ability and comprehension for work or study purposes. It is certainly something I wish I knew more about when I was studying, as textbooks were a dry and tedious read. Now I read for pleasure, but I have a long backlist of TBR (to be read) books, which this will hopefully help with.
The book spells out each of the techniques that have so far been used to assist people with their reading speed and how to improve it immensely. The people and scientists behind each technique and experiment or project regarding this subject, are listed in the book and there is a full list of all the references used at the back of the book, for anyone wanting to follow up on any of it further. Some of the techniques were ones I knew of already and had been using already such as skimming, scanning, reading every third or fifth word and reading a sentence as a whole, but there were lots of new ones about activating the correct side of your brain, different patterns of tracing your reading pattern on a page and how to measure your current reading speed.
I know it says not to try it out on a non-fiction book, but rather to do it on a book you are enjoying, or even one you have read before and will therefore know all the vocabulary included in the book already, but I made it difficult for myself, by using a non-fiction book I was already part way through. The only problem was that the calculation really doesn’t work if you are reading books on your mobile, like me, using the kindle app, or any other, as the page sizes are not what you would find in a book. If I followed the method shown in the book, my reading speed came out as 145 words per minute, but if I actually counted the words on the page I read, rather than words on a couple of lines, then multiplying the lines on the page, gave me a more realistic reading speed of 529 words per minute!
Since I grew up with a mathematical mind, the calculation part of the speed reading technique was of great interest to me and I look forward to testing myself on a book from my reading list and then again after a little while, once I have tried to work on improving my speed by following some of the techniques shown in this book. The upside of being able to learn faster, comprehend what you are reading while reading so much faster and training your brain in new techniques, is more confidence, better concentration, a higher level of education or job opportunities, and the ability to grow within yourself to reach your full potential! An interesting look at speed reading techniques and plenty of the science and history of this subject. How much of it is original to the author themselves is unclear. Some extra diagrams were mentioned and were supposed to be included, but weren’t – they were guided exercises mentioning a horseshoe shape, for one and a number of others. A very useful technique for anyone who loves reading or has a lot of reading to do on a daily basis, but there is a lot of previous history and science from others to get through first! I received an ARC copy of this book from BookSprout and I have freely given my own opinion of the book above.