Speed Reading Made Easy

Nila Banton Smith

• Éditeur: Muriwai Books
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789122527
• Sujet: Psychology
• Sous-sujet: History & Theory in Psychology

SPEED READING IS A GIFT THAT YOU CAN GIVE TO YOURSELFYou may know people who are able to read a newspaper in a few minutes, flip through yet thoroughly absorb a book in an hour, or effortlessly finish skimming a report before you even suspected they were done. Quite possibly you have thought that these people were born with a natural talent for speed reading that you do not possess.Nothing could be further from the truth.Speed reading actually consists of a series of simple skills that can be mastered and applied by anyone willing to take the short time and minimal effort needed to master these so-called "secrets" and "tricks." Now they are no longer either secret or tricky—but completely comprehensible and available in the finest speed reading guide on the market today—SPEED READING MADE EASY"Readable and persuasive."—Cleveland Plain Dealer"An excellent, self-improvement manual...by a specialist."—Los Angeles Times"Examples and self-applicable tests are provided every step of the way...Even the reader who thinks his speed and grasp adequate will benefit."—Saturday Review Syndicate"It is possible for anybody to read faster with increased pleasure and profit."—San Francisco Call-Bulletin

CHAPTER 1 — TAKING INVENTORY

How Do You Rate Yourself?

What do you have to start with? That’s the first thing to find out. You’ve been adding to or, more likely, depleting your stock of reading skills for the past one, two, three, or more decades. Without specific checking you probably have a general idea that you’re a good reader, an average reader, or a poor reader.

Mr. H., a famous newspaper columnist, said to me when he came in: “I think I am a very good reader. I’ve never had any trouble at all in reading. But if I could learn to cover double the amount of material in the time at my disposal, this would just be a matter of plain efficiency. Mind you, though, this isn’t because I’m a poor reader to start with. I’m an excellent reader already.”

Miss G., a story reader at a moving-picture studio, said: “I read about fifty pages an hour. Isn’t that pretty good?”

John M., a high school student, reasoned this way: “I understand that most colleges nowadays give a reading test as a part of their entrance exams. I’ll never pass that test unless I do something about my reading right now. I’m a miserable reader.”

Sarah M., a college student, declared, “I’m a grind. I have to study hours while others are having a good time. I’m a terribly slow reader.”

Mr. M., a businessman, said, “I never can wade through all the white stuff on my desk. I’m a fair reader but the amount of reading that I have to do overpowers me.”

Professor R., a college teacher of English, told me with pride: “I can read a novel in one sitting. That’s really pretty fast reading, isn’t it?”

“I never finish a novel,” complained Mrs. B. “I read too slowly to cover books, so I’ve given them up entirely. About all I can do is to follow the headlines in a newspaper. I must be the world’s worst reader.”

And so it is that we “grade” ourselves. These impressions, however, are too general to be a basis for making any precise judgment in regard to reading competency. Maybe you, like the columnist, have “never had any trouble in reading.” Does that mean that you are an excellent reader as compared with highly-skilled adult readers who have learned the modern techniques of reading?

Even if you do read fifty pages an hour, how well do you get the thought out of what you read? As for the professor, was the book a thin volume with small pages printed in large type like Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday? Or was it a huge, compact volume printed in relatively small type such as Not as a Stranger? And how long was the “sitting”? Two hours? Six hours? Twelve hours?

Obviously there are many fallacies in attempting to grade oneself in reading. If you wish to find out exactly how well you read and how much improvement you achieve as you go along, then you must make more careful measurements than general impressions.

Measuring Your Reading Growth

Measuring your own growth in reading is comparable to measuring your child’s physical growth. If you want to know how fast your child is growing, you periodically weigh him and measure his height. Then you make your comparisons in terms of exact units—pounds and inches. You must do the same sort of thing in evaluating your growth in reading.

Reading is not a “lump sum,” as so many people seem to think. It is a very complex mental process involving many different skills. A horse uses one set of muscles when pulling a heavy load uphill and an entirely different set when trying to hold back that load on his way downhill. So it is with reading. We use different sets of skills when we read different kinds of material for different purposes. You will have opportunities to practice several of these different sets of skills as you work through this book.

Regardless of how varied the skills may be, there are always two fundamental skills which are in operation. Growth in reading is judged in terms of progress in these two basic skills as commonly as physical growth is judged in terms of height and weight. And like height and weight these two skills should grow together simultaneously and in relation to each other.

One of these basic skills is speed. It is the rate with which you can cover printed material through reading. The basic unit used in measuring speed is the number of words per minute. The abbreviation W.P.M. is written after the number indicating a score, as 275 W.P.M. The other basic skill which easily lends itself to measurement is understanding of what is read. This is comprehension. The terms speed and comprehension have special meanings in a reading-instruction vocabulary. You may as well right now become accustomed to these terms as used in this book.

The writer was one day amused when a gentleman came in with this complaint: “I want to talk with you about my wife. I’m very much worried. She’s having a dreadful time with her apprehension.”

He might have been told not to seek improvement of his wife’s “apprehension” lest he have occasion to worry still more. But instead he was told to bring her in for a check-up of her speed and comprehension.

The average reader covers about 250 words per minute. Very good readers read 500 or 600 words per minute. Occasionally there is a person who reads at the phenomenal rate of 1,000 words per minute, or in rare instances even faster. However, ability to cover printed words rapidly is quite valueless unless the reader gathers meaning as his eyes travel over the lines of print.

Fortunately, these two basic skills, speed and comprehension, can be developed with guidance and practice. But they must increase together. Like height and weight in the growing child, comprehension must keep pace with speed in the reading growth of an adult. If you should increase your speed to 600 words per minute and drop your comprehension from 80 to 40 per cent, your speed would do you more harm than good. Therefore, in all the chapters in this book you will be asked to work on both speed and comprehension.

First you need to find out what your normal rate of speed is and also get some idea of how well you are comprehending. You can then use these first scores as a basis for comparison to see later on how much you have improved.

For checking purposes you are asked to read two selections. One is very easy, and you will read it simply for entertainment. The other is more difficult, and you will read it for the information it contains.

You’ll have to time yourself in taking both of these tests, so get out a watch with a second hand. Note the hour and the minute that you begin to read each of the selections and jot this data down in the space provided. This test is given to check your present speed and comprehension in reading easy, narrative material.

Reading for Entertainment

Don’t try to read fast for test purposes. Just read at your comfortable normal rate and for the purpose of enjoying the story.

Ready! Start!

Selection 1

BEGINNING TIME:————

HR.————MIN.————

THE GREAT MOLASSES FLOOD{1}

From early Colonial days on, ships loaded with wooden hogsheads of thick, dark molasses came regularly from the West Indies to unload at Boston’s wharves. Molasses took the place of sugar, which few colonists could afford, and it made Yankee rum. It was a keystone of Boston’s prosperity and trade for almost three centuries—until January 15, 1919.

I was a reporter on the Boston American on that fateful day. The stories coming in over the wire were predicting, rightly, that on the morrow Nebraska would become the 36th state to vote dry, thus bringing nationwide Prohibition upon this country (and rendering great quantities of molasses virtually useless). But even before the news could be printed, the biggest molasses storage tank in all Boston burst and sent an angry deluge of the stuff rampaging through the old North End, tearing down the elevated railway, demolishing buildings, drowning and crushing 21 persons and dozens of horses, wreaking property damage of more than a million dollars.

For years the tank, a bulging giant 50 feet tall and 282 feet in girth, had loomed above the freight-loading depots, stables, and firehouse on Commercial Street, near Boston’s inner harbor. Three days before, the pumps of tankers from Puerto Rico had filled it right up to the brim with 2,320,000 gallons—14,000 tons—of molasses.

At five minutes to noon on that mild winter morning, a telephone rang in the molasses plant’s office in the shadow of the tank. Superintendent William White picked up the receiver and heard his wife insist he join her uptown for lunch. White took a cursory look at the frowning tank, ignored the molasses sweating ominously through the riveted seams, and left—thus undoubtedly saving his life. But the busy market district was thronged with people destined to be less fortunate.

Along Commercial Street, new-fangled motor trucks and horse-team drays clattered on the cobblestones beneath the elevated railway. In the doorways of shops and brick dwellings across the street from the tank, residents were taking advantage of the warm weather to sun themselves. In stables of nearby draying companies, dozens of workhorses were placidly munching hay. Teamsters chatted over their lunch boxes on the freight-loading platforms. Mrs. Bridget Clougherty, 68, stood watching them from the doorway of her frame house at the corner of Copp’s Hill and Commercial. Her big son Martin, a well-known boxer and referee, lay in his third-floor bedroom, sleeping soundly. The time was 12:41.

At this moment Patrolman Frank McManus was making a routine duty call at a police-signal box down the street. Suddenly he heard a “grinding, rumbling” noise. Looking up, he saw a dark sea of liquid gush from the bottom of the tank. He saw the big tank open out and fall apart, and a towering wall of molasses roll over the ground with a seething, hissing sound. Going 35 miles an hour with a push of 25 tons, it enveloped the fire station; then buildings began to collapse. McManus yelled for all the ambulances and policemen available.

At the same moment, the brakeman of a northbound train coming around the curve on the elevated yanked his emergency cord. “All I could see was molasses rushing toward me,” the brakeman later said. The train stopped just as the elevated structure ahead sagged into the raging molasses below; the forward wheel trucks of the first car were lifted off the rails.

Mrs. Mary Musco, watching from the window of her house when the “explosion” came, saw the three-story Clougherty house rise from its foundations and “fly into the air,” then disappear beneath the El in a caldron of floundering horses, people, jagged timbers, splintered wagons, huge crates of goods and—molasses. “I ran for help,” Mrs. Musco said. “It was awful. People were running every which way all covered with molasses.”

To many people the breaking of the tank came with a tearing sound, like the ripping of a huge sheet of paper. To a Navy gunner on a ship in the harbor it was like a succession of reports from an impossibly-enormous machine gun. The tearing sound was caused by the initial giving-away of the tank at its base; the machine-gun reports were rivets bursting upward from the bottom, like buttons popping off a vest.

Then the very steel of the plates themselves sundered and burst outward. One 400-square-foot section of steel weighing two and one half tons was catapulted 182 feet into North End Park. Another murderous ribbon of half-inch steel plate swept across Commercial Street, sheared through a tree-trunk-size steel El column like a knife through butter. A ...

Table des matières

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENT
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 - TAKING INVENTORY
• CHAPTER 2 - DISCOVERY
• CHAPTER 3 - FASTER! FASTER!
• CHAPTER 4 - HEEDING THE SIGNPOSTS
• CHAPTER 5 - SHOP BEFORE YOU READ
• CHAPTER 6 - SIGHT-SEEING AS YOU READ
• CHAPTER 7 - MINING FOR DETAILS
• CHAPTER 8 - RIDING ALONG WITH AN AUTHOR
• CHAPTER 9 - THE KNACK OF SKIMMING
• Answer Keys
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER