Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words (32 page)

Sometimes Bibot
would let his prey
actually out
by the gates,
allowing him to think
for the space
of two minutes
at least
that he really
had escaped out of Paris,
and might even
manage to reach
the coast of England in safety,
but Bibot would let
the unfortunate wretch
walk about ten meters
towards the open country,
then he would send
two men after him
and bring him back,
stripped of his disguise.

Oh!
That was extremely funny,
for as often as not
the fugitive
would prove to be
a woman,
some proud marchioness,
who looked
terribly comical
when she found herself
in Bibot’s clutches
after all,
and knew that a summary trial would await her the next day and after that, the fond embrace of Madame la Guillotine.

No wonder that on this fine afternoon in September the crowd round Bibot’s gate was eager and excited. The lust of blood grows with its satisfaction, there is no satiety: the crowd had seen a hundred noble heads fall beneath the guillotine today, it wanted to make sure that it would see another hundred fall on the morrow.

Bibot was sitting on an overturned and empty cask close by the gate of the barricade; a small detachment of citizen soldiers was under his command. The work had been very hot lately. Those cursed aristos were becoming terrified and tried their hardest to slip out of Paris: men, women and children, whose ancestors, even in remote ages, had served those traitorous Bourbons, were all traitors themselves and right food for the guillotine. Every day Bibot had had the satisfaction of unmasking some fugitive royalists and sending them back to be tried by the Committee of Public Safety, presided over by that good patriot, Citoyen Foucquier-Tinville.

Robespierre and Danton…

Chapter 19: Mythical Stories

There are so many amazing stories about speed reading, in fact about reading in general. That is one reason this book includes a discussion about what reading is and how it works, to help to demonstrate why these stories are so preposterous.

Reading is a more complex mental task then many people realize. It’s actually pretty amazing that it’s possible at all.

At the same time, reading faster is also a lot simpler than is often expected. It’s not learned by a bunch of bizarre exercises, but by simply learning to focus your attention on the meaning of what you read.

Let’s go over some of the popular speed reading stories and see why they don’t make sense.

Thousands of Words per Minute

It’s unfortunate that the business of helping people improve their reading skills has been hijacked by so many charlatans. The myth that we can learn to read at freakishly fast speeds is continually perpetrated in order to sell the maximum number of books and courses.

For example, here is a sample claim from one speed reading book:
“Read at any speed you wish to from 1 to 20,000 words per minute, dependent entirely upon your reading goals.”

"Entirely upon your
goals
"? Well then you wouldn’t need the book, would you? All you need is the goal! Choose the goal and you’re done. And then, what about that low range of ONE word per minute? That actually sounds more difficult than the twenty thousand (and I also suppose twenty thousand and
one
would be completely out of the question).

As proof of how successful their methods are, the same book lists the “World’s Top Ten Speed Readers.” Their listed speeds range between 1,560 and 3,850 words per minute (not 20,000 though). However, none of these names show up on a Google search, making it sound like these top ten amazing readers were only known to the author of that book.

It is not necessary to name this book because these claims are not unusual, and you would have no problem confirming this with your own research.

The biggest problem with claims like these is that they become the common expectation of people when they think of speed reading. These types of results are not true, and they end up costing people in lost time and money and in their unfortunate feelings of frustration.

When people learn that it’s not possible to read thousands of words per minute, they figure, “Why bother trying to improve at all?”

Well, think of it like this. Imagine you have a painful limp and any walking is a frustrating and difficult chore. In fact, everywhere you go, you have to resort to using crutches just to keep from falling down.

Then, a therapist tells you she can help. She can show you some exercises that will cure you. With these exercises, you will be able to walk with ease, go wherever you want, explore all the places that were out of reach before—and even run if you wish—without pain. You could throw those crutches away.

It would be a dream come true, but you would turn her down. You would say, “Walking is not fast enough. I want to run at super-human speeds like the Flash in the DC comic books! I want to run so fast that my friends will be amazed. And besides, I’ve heard that I could learn to do this in sixty minutes with just a few secret running tricks.”

So you hobble out of the therapist’s office, taking your crutches with you.

Well, where are all these Flashes? Where are all these people whose only reading limit is how fast they can flip pages?

Give up your belief in comics. Instead, throw away the crutches of subvocalizing and regression, and begin to enjoy your reading. Explore all the information out there waiting to be discovered without the pain of exhaustion and frustration.

Real
speed reading is six hundred to one thousand words per minute, and most people find four hundred words per minute a stubborn hurtle. But why continue stumbling along at less than two hundred words per minute, and with poor comprehension, if there is a way to make reading a joy rather than a chore?

And who knows? Maybe you can be one of those who reach the thousand words per minute mark. If so, you still have to pass four hundred first. To do that, you need to put on the coveralls and do the work. But regardless of your ultimate achievement, any improvement in your reading speed and comprehension can have a powerful effect on many aspects of your life.

The truth may be a disappointment to some, but in the end, reality is always easier to handle than delusion.

Comprehension Follows Speed

This is actually pretty amazing when you think about it, but doesn’t it seem like hardly anybody is concentrating on teaching readers to
comprehend
better? Instead, they usually suggest that your comprehension will magically improve
after
you learn to “read” faster.

Here’s a passage from a popular speed reading book:
"If you have difficulty with concentration and comprehension… go faster rather than more slowly, and you may find a great improvement."

In the same book, it instructs,
"Practice as fast as you can for 1 minute, not worrying about comprehension."

In another book, the author says,
"Research is increasingly showing that the faster you read, the better your comprehension."

And then another shouts,
“DO NOT CONCERN YOURSELF WITH COMPREHENSION.”

Actually, this is the overwhelming advice in speed reading books and courses.

But does this make sense to anyone? Whose research is this? Research could also show that faster racecar drivers had better skills, but which came first? Wouldn’t it make more sense that skill led to speed, rather than vice versa?

Comprehension Tests

Most speed reading courses will include comprehension tests. They have you read a passage and then ask you to answer questions about the passage. But these comprehension tests are ineffective. They are not only a waste of time, they are often used to fool students into thinking they have improved their reading.

Ineffective

It would certainly be important to know whether or not you understood what you have read. How awful to spend hours reading a book and, only after finishing it, find out that you didn’t understand anything. What a waste of time! But just as when I’m listening to somebody talk, when I’m reading, I generally know if I’m getting it or not—in real time, not after I take some test.

The main problem with comprehension tests is that they are really testing other things besides comprehension—things such as memory and even test-taking skills.

Comprehension tests generally consist of a list of multiple choice or true-false questions at the end of a reading assignment. The problem with such tests is that so much depends on your previous knowledge of the content. And nearly as much depends on your ability to guess which facts you should probably remember for the test.

And not all people would pay attention to the exact same things. For example, an article about 3D printers would be viewed very differently by an engineer, a salesman, and an investor. Each would pay attention to and remember, either, how it works, who would buy one, or what its business growth potential was.

However even though each of us reads for our own reasons, we all know while we are reading whether or not we are grasping the information that’s important to us.

Deceptive

Not only are comprehension tests poor indicators of comprehension, but they are sometimes used to deceive students into thinking they have improved when they haven’t.

The trick is to make the initial test more difficult than the final one, giving the indication that the student’s comprehension has “improved.”

For example, the first reading test is often loaded with names, numbers, and lists; whereas the final test can be of a more general nature, resulting in the kinds of questions you could likely answer correctly even if you didn’t read the article.

Again, I’ll use an example from a popular speed reading book. There are ten reading tests throughout this particular book.

The article for the first test is nineteen hundred words long and contains:

• 43 numbers
  
• 32 proper names
  
• 2 bulleted lists (twenty and seven items long)
  
• 11 comma-delimited lists (i.e.
  “to problem solve, to analyze, to prioritize, to create and to communicate”
  ) with up to eleven items on each list
  

Not only is the article difficult, but many of the questions are misleading. For example, question one on the first test reads,
“True or false? The top eighty percent of British companies invest considerable money and time in training."

The correct answer is “false,” but take a look at the text from the article
: "… of the top 10% of British companies, 80% invested considerable money and time in training…".

It says eighty percent of the
top ten percent!
That is a sneaky trap. And also notice that the number “80” is used in the text, but the word “eighty” is used in the question.

Additionally, the suggestion before taking that first test is,
"Don’t worry about getting low scores in either speed or comprehension."
So a student would obviously show improvement on the last test because before reading the last article, students are instructed to “
Just trust yourself and read as fast as you possibly can.”

Plus, this last article is easier to read and has easier questions. The last article is only fourteen hundred words long (three-quarters the length of the first), much more general in nature, and only contains:

• 5 numbers
  
• 2 proper names
  
• No lists
  

And the questions are absolute softballs. This trick of unequal tests is used by many speed reading courses. They multiply your reading speed by your comprehension percent to establish your “effective” speed. By making the last test easier than the first, they make is seem as if you have made a miraculous improvement during the course!

What’s worse is that this “improvement” is quite often used to disqualify you for any refund, the wording of which typically sounds something like, “Double your
effective
reading speed or your money back.”

JFK the Speed Reader

It’s amazing that this popular speed reading myth has gone on so long. Many speed reading books and courses tell the story of how President Kennedy took the Evelyn Wood course and learned to read twelve hundred words per minute. This success story has been used as proof that “You can do it, too!”

The story of JFK’s reading prowess fit with the popular narrative of the time—that our new president was young, handsome, and clever—so the reading story spread quickly. The bandwagon didn’t even have to slow down for dozens of other speed reading courses to hop on and quote this “fact.”

But President Kennedy never read twelve hundred words per minute. This figure was only an off-the-cuff answer he gave when a reporter questioned him about his reading speed.

It’s true he took the Evelyn Wood course, but he never finished it, and so he never tested his final speed. I doubt JFK was being intentionally dishonest; this may have been the speed at which he could skim to get the gist of material. But according to
The Causes of High And Low Reading Achievement
by Ronald P. Carver, JFK’s reading speed was probably five to six hundred words per minute, an excellent reading speed but not one that belongs in the annals of speed reading legends.

The Phonics Method Causes Subvocalizing

There has long been controversy over how best to teach reading to young children. There is particular contention between the whole-word people and the phonics people. One of the aspersions cast upon the phonics folks is that by teaching kids to sound out words, they are condemning them to a life of vocalizing while they read.

One problem with that logic is that it’s never been shown that whole-word students read
without
vocalizing. And you could also wonder that if the habits of adults are cast in stone as children, then why aren’t we saying each letter too? Because after all, they taught us the alphabet before they taught us phonics.