My words per minute were 197.
This left me devastated. I had just scored below average on my reading speed test.
With a lot of determination, I started practicing speed reading from “The Speed Reading Book” by Tony Buzan.
I was pleasantly surprised only hours later. As I progressed through the following chapters, and did the practices and exercises, my speed improved. At my fourth test I scored a wpm of 249.
What’s amazing is that, In both of these test I had a comprehension rate of 73.3%!!
I almost didn’t buy this book. I did not think it would turn out to be such a gem. The tips and techniques here are common sense and effective.
There’s much more! Tony Buzan also talks about mind maps here. I’ve been using mind maps from my last semester finals. They have proven to be really effective.
I love mind maps! They apparently use both sides of your brain. I don’t really know how they work. But they have reduced the time it takes me to memorize something. It also seems to aid my understanding of a topic.
To be frank, I was scared of speed reading, at first. I thought maybe the comprehension will get lower and lower with each increase in speed.
To my amusement, it turned out to not be the case! My comprehension level stayed the same as my speed rose higher and higher.
Now I am excited to go even beyond that! I hope to increase my WPM up to 1000. I don’t know if this book is going to make this happen for me but I’ll give it a fair shot.
The science behind it made it clear for me. Apparently our brain can take a snapshot of something within microseconds. We don’t need to read slowly and word by word for better comprehension. Rather it’s wiser to read a chunk of words together. Thus the relative meaning of the words become more apparent.
Another great technique for comprehension is to use the first line of each paragraph as a reference. After reading the first line, try to establish a connection of that with the rest of the lines in that paragraph. Was the first line an introduction? Was it a summary of what comes next? Or is there no correlations at all? This increase comprehension and recalling abilities.
Now I feel sad why I didn’t learn this even earlier! I’d have read so many books! Because speed reading has made reading a lot of fun.
I’m excited about this semester and want to see how much better I can do with my newfound powers of speed reading, better comprehension and mind mapping.
I feel angry that it’s not taught in schools. It could have saved so much time that students could invest in there hobbies or towards building a career.
I’d love your feedback. This blog sprung out of passion and not just to make money. I love to learn new skills and share them. It’s like a need for my psyche.
Thanks for reading.
RaihanRiad 