Speed Reading Mastery Course : Read Fast with Instant Accelerated Speed

1. Welcome: I've been teaching speed reading techniques for over eight years to students and professionals around the world. And in this course, we're going to help you improve your reading speed. Whether you're reading for school, work or for fun, reading underlies so much of our lives. Imagine what you could do if you were able to double your reading speed. How much time would it free up in your busy schedule? How much more could you learn? How much better would your grades be if you're overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. And this course is for you. If you're hungry for knowledge, this course is for you. And if you just plain love reading, then this course is definitely for you. The goal of this course is to improve your reading speed, but it will also focus strongly on improving your comprehension and retention. These are three important areas we need to master. Let's go ahead and get started with speed reading fundamentals. 2. What you should know before watching this course: Before we get started, there are a few things you should know before watching this course. As you make your way through this course, I'll go over a variety of techniques and exercises to help you become a more efficient reader. Every so often I'll ask you to practice a particular exercise or technique in your own reading material. What kind of reading material do I want you to use? I want you to use the same material you already read on a daily basis. If you're a student, you can use your textbook. If you're a business professional or executive, you can use your work-related material. Or if you want to use reading material that's of personal interest to you, that's fine with me. The important thing here is that you practice what you learn will focus on three areas of improvement, speed, comprehension, and retention. It's important to practice each of these areas separately and then try to tie them together in order to make real improvements in anything we need to practice. And if you practice the exercises discussed in this course, I think you'll find yourself reading significantly faster while also improving your comprehension and retention of the material. 3. How fast do you currently read: In this lesson, I'll show you how to figure out how fast you read and how that speed compares to the average reader. You can measure your reading speed using the exercise file included in this lesson. We're going to start by reading for just one minute. So set a timer for yourself. Read at whatever speed feels comfortable. Don't go faster or slower than you normally would. And make sure that you're reading for good comprehension. When one minute is over, mark the spot where you stopped reading and then look over to the right-hand margin of the page. You'll notice a list of numbers on the right hand side of this article. These numbers will tell you how many words in total you've read if you finish that particular line of text. For example, if at the end of the minute of reading you've finished the first two paragraphs, then that would correspond to 250 words. So your reading speed would be 250 words per minute. The average person read somewhere in the range of a 150 to 250 words per minute through this kind of material. If you were above 250, you're faster than average reader. And of course, if you're below 150 here, a little below average, regardless of whether your average above average or even below average. Our goal in this course is to help you make an improvement. The good news is that we know our starting point and now we can focus on making progress. 4. Three reading habits that slow you down: Before we get started on improving our reading skills, let's talk about three old reading habits that may be slowing you down. The first told reading habit is called fixation. Fixation is something your eyes do while reading. They fixate on a word-by-word basis. Now, when we first learned how to read this was absolutely necessary. We had to fix it on each word because we had to break it down syllable by syllable. But eventually as you become fluent in a language, you don't have to fixate on each word because you're fully capable of reading groups of words. And actually you probably already read groups of words sometimes without realizing it. For example, if you're driving a car and you see a sign that says New York City. Think about how your eyes would react. First. Your eyes are initially fixated on the road. But as a sign comes into view, your eyes will only make one fixation on the sign and you'll read those three words. No problem in one fixation. However, if those same words we're in the middle of some paragraph, Most people would fixate on every word. And that's an old reading habit we need to change if we're going to start reading faster. As this course goes along, we'll discuss a number of techniques and exercises to help you read groups of words more effectively. The second old reading habit we need to change is called regression. Regression is something that all of us have done at some point. And that is going back to reread material. Have you ever read a whole page of text and stopped to think to yourself? I have no clue what I just read. All of us have had this happen to us. And we know it's an issue with concentration. Sometimes our mind wanders off while reading, especially if the material is dry and doesn't pique your interest. So in this course we'll work on helping you improve your focus so you don't go back to reread as much as you currently do. The third old reading habit is the one that slows us down the most. It's called sub vocalization. And that's simply the voice you hear in your head while you're reading. Now just because you're hearing voices in your head, it doesn't mean you're crazy. It's your voice. After all, this habit of sub vocalization is common among all readers. You've probably noticed herself saying each and every word in your head as you read through your material. But there's a reason we need to change this habit. If you think about it, most of the words you read you've seen many times, maybe thousands of times. So the question is, do I have to say a word and my head to understand what it means? And the answer is no. You don't have to say a word in your head to know what it means. For example, when you're driving a car and you see a stop sign, do you say stop in your head? Probably not. You don't have to say the word stop in your head to know what the word means. But if the word stop was in the middle of some paragraph you were reading, you probably would say stop in your head. And that's part of the issue with sub vocalization. The main reason we need to change this old reading habit is because it slows us down. Think about it. If you're saying every word in your head, doesn't that mean you'll only read as fast as you talk. And there's a limit to how fast you can talk. The average reading speed is a 150 to 250 words a minute. Guess what the average talking speed is? It turns out it's exactly the same. A 150 to 250 words a minute. Why is the average reading speed the same as the average talking speed? It's because of this habit sub vocalization. If you say every word in your head while reading, then you'll only read as fast as you talk. And that's a problem set vocalization limits are reading speed. But I want you to know that you're fully capable of reading faster than you can talk, because you can think a lot faster than you can talk. So as we go along through this course, we'll do a number of exercises that will help you change this habit along with the others. To recap the three old reading habits, we need to change our fixation. We need to be able to read groups of words. Regression. We want to improve our concentration so we don't go back to reread as much and sub vocalization. We don't want to say every word in our head because that limits our reading speed. 5. Using your hand to guide your eyes: The simplest thing you can do right now to improve your reading speed is to use your hand as a guide. Now you can use your hand, your finger, or even a pen while you're reading. Either way you're guiding your eyes through the text. And this is the simplest way to improve your concentration while reading. And guess what? If you have better concentration, you'll have a better reading speed. And also if you're able to concentrate better, that should also improve your comprehension to, you'll want to place your finger or pen slightly below the text on a page and underline the words from left to right in one continuous motion. Don't actually look at your finger, but instead lytic guide you from left to right through the line of text. Your eyes being naturally attracted to motion, will follow your finger through the material. Now initially you might feel slightly uncomfortable if you don't already read with your hand. But the more you do it, the more natural it becomes. As you would imagine, this technique works better on printed material then computer-based text. Before moving forward, let's practice this exercise. Take out some reading material that you have with you and try reading with your hand or pen for 15 minutes. You should find yourself better focused while reading. And some people notice an immediate improvement of 20 to 30% in their reading speed just by using their hand while reading. 6. Reading faster on the computer screen: One of the most fundamental speed reading techniques involves the use of your hand as a guide while reading. But what if you're reading on the computer screen? It's not very practical to drag your hand across the screen while reading. And if you're reading from a touchscreen, This is problematic. So in this video, we're going to talk about how you can read faster on the computer screen without using your hand as a guide. First, let's talk about the challenges involved with reading on the computer screen. One study showed that the average person reads 20 to 30% slower on the computer screen as opposed to reading on the printed page. Part of the reason has to do with comfort. Keep in mind when you're reading on the computer screen, a light is being beamed directly at your eyes, which can cause some discomfort after reading for long periods of time. So it's always a good idea to make sure you adjust the brightness of your screen so you can read as comfortably as possible. Comfort is not the only challenge. Distractions or the main reason why people read more slowly on the computer screen. There are distractions from ads that might be blinking on the side of the page while you try to read. They're also personal distractions. Sometimes we're reading an article and all of a sudden we have this urge to check email or Facebook, or maybe a chat notification pops up all your reading. There are so many ways to get distracted while reading on the computer screen, which is why it's important to learn how to maintain our concentration on the task at hand. Now if you're spending a lot of time reading on the computer screen, there's a tool we developed at my company, iris reading to help you read faster. The speed reading tool is called accelerator, and it is a free web-based application that you can get an accelerator.com. Here's how it works. Let's say you have a news article or a blog post that you want to read. All you have to do is copy the texture planning to read and then paste it into the tool at accelerator.com. Then you'll click the Begin button at the bottom of the screen. Under the settings, you can choose how fast you want to go. Now keep in mind the average reading speed is around 200 words per minute. Let's challenge ourselves to go faster than average by setting it at 300 words per minute. There are a number of other settings here and we'll get to them in a little bit. But right now I want to show you how the application works. Click Save to continue. And you'll notice a green button read on your screen. When you click the red button, you'll notice that the words you previously pasted will start blinking on the screen at the speed that you set. I'm going to go ahead and click the red button so you can see for yourself. Let's read through this article at 300 words per minute. Remember to keep your eyes focused on the middle of the screen and see if you can comprehend this material at a speed that is faster than average. Okay, let's stop reading there. How did you do were you able to keep up and comprehend the material? If so, great job. You're reading at 300 words a minute. That's 50% faster than average. Let's go back into the settings so I can show you some useful features in this application. Notice the setting chunk size. This refers to how many words are blinked at a time. I recommend you start by setting this at two because you're fully capable of reading more than one word at a time. Or if you want to challenge yourself even further, you can set it to blink three words at a time. For most beginners, reading two or three words at a time isn't very difficult. This application works by using a technology called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, otherwise known as RSVP. Rsvp is a simple method of displaying text on a screen. And it's been shown by studies to help people read faster on the computer. The reason that's helpful is because you only have to focus your eyes in one area of the screen. When most people read their eyes tend to jump from one word to the next in a stop and go type fashion. Using an application like accelerator allows your eyes to stay rested in one place. And there are a number of other settings you can enable to make your reading even more efficient. Another setting allows you to start a new chunk of text at the end of sentences or paragraphs. This helps your comprehension. If you're using the application to display groups of words, you can improve your comprehension even further by enabling the setting that will do a slight pause at the end of sentences and paragraphs. You can even skip over stopwords that convey no additional meaning to the sentence, words like the or n. This setting makes your reading even faster and more efficient. You can use this application as a practice tool. Or if you do most of your reading online, you can use it as a productivity tool to get through the material faster and more effectively. If you have a moment, try using accelerator right now to practice reading for about 15 minutes. I think you'll find it to be a very useful training tool. 7. Simple drills you can practice to boost reading speed: Let's talk about how you can start improving your reading speed. In this video, we'll cover a very basic speed reading drill that will help you boost your reading rate. Now this exercise can be done on paper or digitally. It's completely up to you. I suggest you use material that you normally have to read, whether it's for school, work or personal reading. Now in this drill will be reading for 20 minutes. So make sure you have enough reading material for that amount of time. Here's how the drill works. You'll start by reading for 20 minutes. During this time, you wanna make sure you're reading with the goal of strong comprehension. Don't go too fast or too slow. Read at whatever speed feels comfortable. After reading for 20 minutes, you'll want to mark the place where you stopped. The goal of this drill is to purposely go faster than we would normally read. How are we going to do that? Well, we're simply going to reread the material we just went through. But we're going to do it at double the reading speed. So in the first step, you read for 20 minutes, and then the next step you need to get through that same material in ten minutes or less. The whole point of this drill is to get used to seeing words at a faster rate. Don't worry if your comprehension isn't perfect during this exercise, we're essentially skimming material we previously read at a speed that's at least double our regular reading speed. Why does it still work? If you get used to practicing a drill where you're purposely going faster than you would normally read at w or normal reading speed. Then later when you dropped your speed down to more reasonable rate, it won't feel as fast. For example, let's say you're reading at 200 words per minute, which is an average reading speed. When you practice a drill like the one we just mentioned, you're forcing yourself to go through the material at a speed of 400 words per minute or more. After practicing that drill, when you go back to normal reading for strong comprehension, you'll notice that the lower speed of something like 250 words a minute won't feel as fast and that you can maintain your comprehension at that higher rate. Once you start reading comfortably with comprehension at 250 words a minute, that means you should be practicing your speed drills at 500 words a minute. So later on, 301 feels fast. The easiest way to ensure you're going double your reading speed is to read for a period of time, say 20 minutes, and then go through that same material and half the time, say ten minutes, if you were reading for 20. And by the way, this drill has a dual benefit. By skimming through material you already read. You're essentially reviewing what you just read and this will help you remember the material a little more effectively. In addition to helping you improve your reading speed, you'll want to practice this kind of drill repetitively over time to get the best results. Ideally, I'd recommend practicing this drill every day for two weeks. Here's how you can practice. Read for 20 minutes and then speed through the material that you just read in ten minutes. And then repeat, read for another 20 minutes and then speed through that material in ten minutes. At this point, you will have gotten 20 minutes of practice doing the drill and about 40 minutes of regular reading done. So doing this kind of exercise would require an hour of your time. Doing these drills will help you make gradual and consistent increases in your reading speed to keep track of your results, I recommend you measure your reading speed on a daily basis to take note of your progress. To test your reading speed, just read for a minute and count how many words you read during that time to figure out your words per minute, reading rate will cover a number of other reading exercises and techniques in this course. But this is a fundamental speed reading drill they can practice now to start increasing your reading rate immediately. 8. Reading groups of words: Part of the reason why people read slowly is because they read on a word-by-word basis. Now you can speed up your reading if you learn how to read more than one word at a time. This is what we'll focus on in this video. First off, I want you to know that you probably already read groups of words without realizing it. This happens all the time when you're driving. If you saw a sign that said New York City, while driving, you'd probably be able to read all three words and just one glance. So we need to replicate this ability that we already have while reading. Here's a technique for reading groups of words. Think of each line of text as being broken up into three parts, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Think of these three areas as fixation points. You're going to focus your eyes so that they make three fixations per line. Once at the beginning, once in the middle, and once at the end. During each one of those three fixation points, you'll attempt to read the group of words in that area. Your goal is to read between three to five words. Perfect station. Now if your lines are very narrow, let's say between five to eight words per line. You may want to make just two fixations per line on the first half and the second half of the line. Either way, your goal will be the same to read between three to five words. Perfect station. This may be a challenge initially, but with practice, you'll find yourself reading groups of words more easily. If you haven't moment right now, try reading this way for ten minutes. You can do this on the computer screen using accelerator.com or on a printed page using the fixation point technique we just discussed. 9. Using deadlines to improve your reading speed: If you want to read faster, you need to improve your focus. One way you can do this by setting deadlines for yourself while reading. Here's a simple reading exercise that will help you read faster through the use of deadlines. You'll need some reading material and a timer for this exercise. To start. Just see how long it takes to read just one page of text. Let's say it took you one minute and five seconds. Write this number down somewhere and think of it as your benchmark going forward now you need to meet or beat this time with other pages of similar length. So if you read that one page in one minute, in five seconds, let's try to see if we could do the same amount of reading and a little less time. Try reading another page of text and see if you can get it done faster. You want to repeat this exercise, keeping track of how much time it takes you to read a page. And little by little lessening the time. You can keep track of your time on a separate sheet of paper or in a spreadsheet. But it's important to keep track and measure your progress. Your spreadsheet of progress can be simple, it can look something like this. So you might start off with a minute in five seconds. And on attempt number two, you may read that page a little faster. On attempt number three, maybe it takes you a little longer and you find yourself getting through the page in a minute and eight seconds. No worries. We would keep on trying. On your next attempt, you might get through the page of text in a minute and 1 second, and then 58 seconds on a tip number five, as we continue practicing and focusing intensely on a time deadline, you'll find it easier and easier to get through the pages in your material faster. This deadline exercise is a great way to start increasing your reading rate. But just like anything else that takes practice, I'd recommend starting with tracking your time for just one page because it provides immediate feedback. After a little practice, try tracking your time while reading two pages of text or whatever you're comfortable with. And of course, keep in mind that while doing this exercise, if the sentence continues from one page to the next, just continue reading until you finish that sentence. It may be a challenge to go faster at first, but with practice, you'll find it easier to get through the page faster. This kind of time breeding with deadlines should be practiced about 15 minutes a day for two weeks. During this timeframe, you'll find a gradual increase in your speed as you challenge yourself to get through the material and less time to get better at anything you need to challenge yourself and sometimes push yourself out of your comfort zone. This exercise does just that and is a great way for improving your reading speed. 10. Preview the material: Most people read everything from beginning to end. In this lesson, I'd like to change the way you think about reading. Would it be easier to read something if you were already somewhat familiar with the information? Most people would agree with that. But most of the time before we start reading, we aren't familiar with the material. I mean, that's the whole point of reading, right? To get familiar with new information. But before you start reading that new information from beginning to end, you should get an idea of what you are about to read. This is where the preview reading technique will help you. Simply put the preview provides you with a general idea of what the reading material will be about. Here's how you would do it in different types of materials. Let's say you're reading a simple one-page article. You can preview it by simply reading the first sentence of each paragraph. Since the first sentences tend to be the main idea is reading the first sentences first would allow you to get all the main points initially. Now that you know what the article is generally about, you should be able to read the article a little faster than usual. And since you know what to expect, we should also be able to read the article with better comprehension to what if you were reading a chapter in your textbook? A good way to preview a chapter in a nonfiction book, like a textbook, would be to read the introduction and conclusion. And a textbook, the introduction might actually be titled introduction or maybe objectives. And the conclusion might be spelled out exactly as conclusion or summary. Or even if you don't have clearly described titles for the sections. The idea here is that you read something from the beginning and something from the end. It could simply be the first and last paragraph of the chapter, or maybe the first three paragraphs and the last three paragraphs. Either way you're reading what is meant to be an introduction to the chapter and some concluding text. This preview provides you with some solid information. Now that I know this general information, it will make reading the chapter a little easier. Not only will I read it faster now that I've done a preview, but I'll also be able to have strong comprehension since I know what to expect. 11. Get an overview of the material: In the last lesson, we discussed the preview reading technique, which usually involves reading the introduction and conclusion to the material. In this video, we'll discuss the second step called an overview. After he finished reading the introduction and conclusion during the previous step, you'll want to dig a little deeper. So during the overview stuff, here's what you're going to do. You'll read all the headings, subheadings, and bold-faced words. If your material is unstructured this way, you could alternatively read the first sentence of each paragraph, since each first sentence is usually a main idea. As you're going through the material, you may come across graphs or diagrams. If this is the case, just read the titles of the diagrams. You don't need to fully analyze them just yet. The goal during the overview is to find the most important concepts that will be discussed in the material that you're reading. This part of the reading process shouldn't take that long. And some pieces of material this may take you less than one minute. And of course, in long chapters it might take you a little longer, but the goal is still the same. You want to get familiar with your reading material before you start reading it. And if you can get familiar with it, that will allow you to read faster with strong comprehension when you decide to read the material in its entirety. 12. Read the material: In this video, we are simply building on concepts we previously learned, specifically the preview and overview. If you recall, the preview is the first step where you read the introduction and conclusion. The overviews of the second step, where you read all the headings and bold-faced words or the first sentences of each paragraph. Which leads us naturally to our third and most important step, the read. In other words, let's read the material that we've been getting familiar with. This is a three-step reading strategy called the multiple reading process. Preview, overview, read. Think about the way most people read. A lot of people start from the beginning and read in a very linear way to the end. But you don't have to read all material this way. In fact, reading this way as part of the reason why people read slowly. If you don't know what to expect from the material, you're going to have to read it slower. Imagine the alternative. If you start by reading the intro and conclusion, and then proceed to read all the headings or first sentences. And think about the advantage you have. When you start reading the material, you should naturally be able to go a little faster since you know what to expect. But what about your comprehension? That too should be enhanced since you're already somewhat familiar with the material. And there is a third area of reading that's very important to us, our retention. What you remember is largely a function of repetition. Look at all the repetition going on in this process. Those three steps are purposely set up to provide increased repetition during the reading process. Now most people read something beginning to end and they wonder why they forget everything the next day? The answer has to do with repetition. If you don't preview and overview of the material, then you've only had one repetition. And you'll likely forget much of what you read. The three-step multiple reading process helps us with the three areas of reading that we need to have in order to be efficient. Speed, comprehension and retention. 13. The difference between comprehension and retention: In this video, I want to discuss the difference between comprehension and retention. Because some people think they're the same, but there's a subtle difference between them. Comprehension is what your understanding as you're reading the material in that present moment. And retention is what you remember later on. For example, you might be reading a novel and enjoying it in that present moment, that's comprehension. But what if someone asked you later on what it was about? Or what if you had a test on the details of the novel? Have you ever had the experience where you get to a certain question on a test and your mind just goes blank. Sometimes it's at a point where you know the answer, you're just having trouble remembering it. It's as if they answer is on the tip of your tongue. Well, this is not an issue with comprehension. This is an issue with retention. Your ability to recall information. Isn't it true that sometimes we can have great comprehension and then absolutely horrible retention? That's why it's important for us to note that comprehension and retention are two separate areas that we need to work on. And in the coming lessons, we'll work on both of these important skills. 14. The read and recall method: The easiest way to improve your comprehension is to adjust your reading speed. In other words, don't always read at the same speed. There are points where you should slow down and points where you should speed up. Adjusting your speed is very important. And there are some simple ways you can do it. Here's a good rule of thumb. Slowed down on the first sentence of a paragraph and then speed up a little bit through the rest of the paragraph. When you get to a new paragraph, just repeat the process, slow down on the first sentence and again, speed up a little through the rest of the paragraph. Now why would we slow down on the first sentence of a paragraph? As you probably already know, the first sentence of a paragraph tends to be the main idea or topic sentence of that paragraph. It's not always the case, but most of the time, maybe 80% of the time or more. The first sentence is the main idea of the paragraph. So it's important to slow down just a little bit here to make sure you don't miss that important sentence. There are a variety of ways you can adjust your reading speed while going through the material. Slowing down on the first sentence of a paragraph is just one way to do it. If you're a student and you're reading something very important that's likely to be on the final exam. You might slow down a little bit through that section and speed up through material you're already familiar with. Or you might be reading a novel. And at the beginning of the story, you might slow it down a bit to speed up through the middle and slowing it back down near the end. Again, the key here is that you adjust your reading speed at some points you should speed up and at other points you should slow down. But you should never read at the same speed through all of them material. Slowing down on the first sentence of a paragraph is a good rule of thumb that works with most types of material. And this is an easy way for you to improve your comprehension with little to no practice. If you have a moment to do some reading right now, try it out for yourself. 15. A simple technique to improve comprehension: Have you ever read a whole page of text and then wondered, I have no clue what I just read. In this video, I'll go over a simple exercise you can practice. So this doesn't happen as often. It's called the read and recall method. And it will help you remember more of what you read. Here's how it works. You read a paragraph and then immediately take note of what you just read. And then you simply repeat the process. Read a paragraph, taken note, read another paragraph, taken note. These notes should be quick. Just write a word or phrase that describes some of the content in that paragraph. Why are we doing this? The idea is to get you into the mindset of constantly asking yourself, what did I just read? If you force yourself to take a quick note after every paragraph you read, you'll find yourself paying more attention to the material. And with practice, you'll improve your ability to retain the information. Now I'm not suggesting you need to take notes after every paragraph you read for the rest of your life. This is simply an exercise you can practice to improve your recall abilities. I'd suggest practicing this 15 minutes a day for two weeks. If you want to strengthen your recall with practice, you'll find it easier to remember what you're reading because you'll be in the habit of constantly thinking, what did I just read? Part of the reason why we forget information is because sometimes we aren't paying attention to begin with. Have you ever forgotten someone's name almost immediately after they told you it? That's usually an attention problem. Before we try to remember anything, The first step is to always make sure we're paying attention. And with reading the same thing happens if we aren't paying attention, that obviously we won't be able to remember. The reader recalled method helps you pay attention because it forces you to take notes after every paragraph. If I know I need to write something down that are more likely to pay attention while I'm reading. It's a simple but effective exercise to improving your retention. 16. How your memory works: There are several systems that work together to form memories. These different systems help you create, store, and retrieve various pieces of information and experiences. On a daily basis, your brain is overwhelmed with information. But these systems allow us to sort through the information to find the most important things that need to be turned into memories. In this video, I'll go through the memory process and how it works, and how you can use this knowledge to remember or retain more of what you read. There are three main types of memory that you need to be aware of. Sensory memory, short-term memory, and of course, long-term memory. Let's talk about each of these three memories as they're very important and understanding how your memory works. Sensory memory is your first and most initial form of memory. These memories come from your five senses, your sense of sight, your ability to hear, smell, taste, and touch all create sensory memories that are held for no more than a few seconds. So I think of sensory memory as a shorter version of short-term memory. Attention determines whether or not the information you are gathering from your five senses will be retained in your short-term memory. Now improving your attention can be easier said than done, but you can actually use your senses to improve your attentiveness. To remember information or an experience. Try to focus on all the sensory aspects of the situation. For example, if you're reading something, pay close attention to the visual structure of the page in the chapter. Focuses on the smells and sounds of the surrounding environment. Try to link those census to the information you're reading. Now let's talk about short-term memory. This is where you hold information that needs to be used at the moment. Use your short-term memory for many functions, some of which include reading, writing, Planning, and mental math. As the name implies, short-term memory contains information with an expiration date unless you rehearse this information or committed to memory in some other way, you'll forget it within a few seconds. Now that we've talked about short-term memory and the even shorter sensory memory. Let's discuss long-term memory. How is it that memories go from short-term to long-term memory? The single most important factor is repetition. So how do we apply repetition to the material we're reading? If you're reading, you need to have some sort of repetition involved to remember the information. But no one wants to read their material five or ten times just to remember it. I want to read the text once and remember it well. So here are some simple ways to get the repetition. You need to remember more of what you read. Remember the multiple reading process. Applying this process provides you with three separate exposures to the material. Those three repetitions will help us remember the information more easily. If you need to remember the information very well, you'll wanna take notes during this three-step process to maximize the number of repetitions. For example, after you preview the material, takes some general notes. That's two repetitions right there, one for the reading part and one for the notetaking part. Then you overview the material and take notes at the end of this step. And that's another two repetitions right there for a total of four now, so before you even start reading the material fully, you've had for repetitions or exposures to the text. Now you proceed to the third step and read the information in its entirety. And of course, you can take notes while you're reading as you encounter notable information or at the end of sections. And this would increase the amount of repetition even further. Just make sure your notes are quick and concise so they don't take too much time away from your reading. So if we apply the multiple reading process while taking notes in the manner we just discussed, it would provide you with a minimum of six repetitions or exposures to the material. Compare that to the way most people read. They go from beginning to end slowly, of course, because they don't know what to expect. And then they wonder why they can't remember any of the information the next day. The reason they can't remember us because they've only had one repetition or exposure to the material. And because repetition is so important to your long-term memory, they'll easily forget what they just read. If you need to remember, you need to get your repetition and it's as simple as that. 17. Memory principles: We already discussed the importance of repetition and how you can increase the amount of repetitions you get by implementing the three-step multiple reading process and by taking notes. But if you want to get even more repetition and tried talking to another person about what you just read. Anytime you can put something into your own words and teach it to someone else, you'll find yourself better able to remember that information. But repetition isn't the only thing that improves your memory. There are a number of other memory principles that help you remember information more effectively. For example, visualization. Anytime you can visualize something, it's easier to remember. That's why it's easier to remember people's faces rather than their names. While reading, you want to actively try to imagine the information you are reading visually in your head. Try doing this at the end of paragraphs or sections. Exaggeration is another powerful memory principle. In other words, we remember things that are out of the ordinary. Whatever visualizations you're making while reading, try to exaggerate them. The easiest way to do that is to make something really big or really small. Association is another important memory principle. Anytime we can associate One thing we read to another thing we already know and makes our memory of the information even stronger. And if you have to read large amounts of complicated information, chunking the reading into parts can make it easier for your brain to process the information. For example, let's say your chapter was 50 pages in length. You might break it down into sub chapters. Maybe there are five, ten-page sections. You can apply the multiple reading process on those five chunked sections. You preview Section one, then Overview section one, and then read it. Then do the same for section number two. Chunking the information into these five parts makes it easier to manage and easier to remember. If you use a combination of these five memory principles, you'll find it easier to retain the information you read. 18. Memorizing technical terms: Sometimes you're trying to read through the material quickly, but you've come across technical terms. These might be words you've never seen before. How do we deal with situations like this? First off, don't let that immediately stop you're reading. Try to finish the rest of the paragraph. Sometimes you can figure out the meaning of the word through the context. But what if you can't? You might have to look the word up and committed to memory. In this video, we'll discuss the similar sound technique and it will help you remember the definition of words you aren't familiar with. Showing you how the similar sound technique works. Let's start with a simple example and then we'll move on to a more complex one. Let's take the word claustrophobia. Now you probably already know what this word means. It's the fear of closed spaces, especially very narrow and crowded spaces. But if you had to teach this words meaning to a little kid that wasn't familiar with it, how would you do it? You could use a similar sound technique and here's how it would work. You start by looking for a similar sound within the word that a little kid might be familiar with. If you look at the word claustrophobia, you could take the initial part clause and associated to Santa Claus. You would then try to link the word Santa Claus visually to the meaning of the word, a fear of closed spaces. So you can tell this little kid to imagine Santa Claus being afraid of tight chimney spaces. Why? Because Santa is a big guy and he might get stuck. Or maybe Santa is afraid of getting burned by a fire at the bottom of the chimney. Regardless, we reinforce the image that Santa Claus is afraid of tight chimney spaces. Now later on when asked to recall the meaning of the word, what's the first thing this little kid would notice about the word claustrophobia. They would see the clause part. And immediately that would remind them of Santa, which would then remind them that Santa was afraid of tight chimney spaces. Linking them back to the original meaning of the word a fear of tight, closed in spaces. Now let's try this with the word you probably aren't familiar with. Malone phobia. This is a fear of sharp objects like needles, knives, or even pencils. To implement the technique, start by looking for a similar sound within this word. Since you probably already know that phobia means the fear of focus on the initial part of the word the loan. Now, it could sound like a number of things. For example, bellow, PNY kind of sounds like Bologna, or by lone kind of sounds like balloon. It doesn't have to sound exactly the same as another word. It just has to have a similar sound. For the purpose of this example, let's go the balloon route. I want you to visualize a balloon in your mind. And now we need to link back to the meaning, the fear of sharp objects. I want you to imagine a needle coming slowly towards the balloon. And the balloon is afraid of being popped by the needle. Now you really need to picture this and also exaggerate the image. If you'll recall from an earlier lesson, we talked about how exaggeration helps us remember things. So imagine the balloon is freaking out that this needle is coming slowly towards it. The balloon is sweating and screaming for help as the needle gets closer and closer to popping it. If you can visualize a scenario like this, what will happen later when you see the word blown phobia? You'll search for the similar sound and immediately you'll come across balloon. Then you'll remember that the balloon was afraid of this needle that was coming towards it. And of course at this point you'll make the connection back to the fact that balloon phobia is the fear of sharp objects like needles. Do you see how that works? This technique takes advantage of the fact that humans are very good at remembering visual information and things that are out of the ordinary. 19. The 80:20 principle of reading: In this video, we're going to discuss the 80-20 principle and how you can apply it to make yourself a more efficient reader. If you're not already familiar with the 80-20 principle, let me introduce you to the concept. The 80-20 principle is sometimes referred to as Pareto's principle. It's named after an Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population in Italy at the time. He later developed his principle by observing the phenomenon in a variety of social, scientific, and economic circumstances. For example, many businesses find that 80% of their revenues come from 20% of their customers. On a personal level, you may find that 20% of your clothes are worn 80% of the time. Now the 80-20 principle doesn't mean that it's always 8020. It just means there's an imbalance. For example, 70% of a company's revenues could come from 13% of their customers. That would still be an example of the 80-20 principle. Generally speaking, the 80-20 principle states that for many events, roughly 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. Why is this important? Because you can use the 80-20 principle to become a more efficient reader. Think about it this way. 80% of the information in your book or chapter could be coming from 20% of the material. Or another way to think of it is how can you spend 20% of your time to get 80% of the information? Earlier in this course, we discussed the three-step multiple reading process. And during the preview and overview steps, you are focusing on roughly 20% of the chapter in the hopes of getting 80% of the information. The multiple reading process as an example of the 80-20 principle in practice when it comes to reading. And it's important to keep in mind that there are situations where you might not have to read the text in its entirety. If your goal is just to get the gist of the information. And you may only need to read about 20% of the material depending on your purpose, that could be enough information for certain circumstances. So to make yourself a more productive reader, it's always a good idea to keep the 80-20 principle in mind. 20. How to get through a book a day: In this video, we're going to focus on getting you through material that you've been wanting to read, but haven't had time to. Do you have a stack of books or magazines that you've been wanting to read. If so, this lesson is for you. You can get through a book a day by utilizing some of the concepts we discussed in earlier lessons, specifically the preview technique and the 80-20 principle. The reading strategy we're about to talk about is suitable for informational material. So make sure you're applying it to nonfiction rather than fiction. Here's how it works. Step one, do what you would normally do with a brand new book. Read the back or inside flap and the table of contents to get an idea of what the book is about. Step two, read the introduction and conclusion to every chapter. If you don't have a clearly specified introduction and conclusion, try reading the first two to three paragraphs and the last two to three paragraphs of each chapter. By doing this, we're essentially previewing the whole book and utilizing the 80-20 principle. Reading a small portion of the book, less than 20% in order to get a large amount of information, maybe 80% or another way to think about this is that you're spending a small amount of time, less than 20% in order to get as much information as you can, possibly 80%. For many non-fiction books, this process would take ten to 20 minutes. And even if it takes a little longer, you're still spending a relatively short amount of time consuming a lot of information. The goal here is to get as much information about the book in as little time as possible. We're obviously not reading the entire book here, but you can get through a majority of the most important information by following the strategy. Reading the introduction and conclusion to each chapter allows you to get much more than just the gist of the material. In many situations, you'll almost feel as though you read the book, even though you've only read a small portion of it. This because reading the intros and conclusions covered the central concepts of the book. And if you decide to read the entire book in the future, you'll already have a good idea of what it's about, allowing you to read it faster with better comprehension. Or maybe you'll decide that you know enough about the subject and don't need to read it. So you can use this strategy of previewing a book to act as sort of a filter to figure out which books are worth your time. If you're looking for a quick way to fly through books, try this specific preview strategy that we've been discussing. See if you can do it on a book each day for seven days. You can think of this 7-day challenge as unofficial homework for this lesson. Starting today. Try doing this strategy on a book for a full week. You may find this so helpful that you'll want to turn it into a daily habit. You'll be surprised at how much information you can consume in such little time. If you're hungry for knowledge and love consuming information, this is a great reading strategy for you to implement. 21. Tips for reading news articles: Let's talk about reading news articles. The constant stream of news that you may be reading on a daily basis has a structure to it. And if we understand the structure of these articles, we can read them more effectively. Most news articles are written with a structure known as an upside-down pyramid or triangle. All this means is that the most important information will appear near the top. And in fact, the article is written with priorities and mind. From most important to least important is the way that reporters and journalists will, right? When they're creating news articles. The who, what, where, when and how will all appear in the first few paragraphs. While the least important information will appear in the middle and the bottom of the article. Now that we know this, let's go over some strategies for reading newspapers quickly. If you're just trying to get a general idea of what's happening in the news. You can simply read the first two to three paragraphs of an article and you'll have most of the information, sometimes 80% of it. Notice how this is reflective of the 80-20 principle we discussed in an earlier lesson in this course. By reading just the first few paragraphs of an article about 20%, you can get about 80% of the information. Let's say you want to get through the whole newspaper, but you realize that not every article will interest you if you're reading an actual newspaper, here's what I suggest for articles that are in print, read the first three paragraphs of the article, then decide whether or not you want to read that article later on. If the answer is yes, simply circle the title and move on to the next article and repeat the process reading the first three paragraphs. If you aren't interested in the article after reading the first three paragraphs, simply cross it out and move on. You might cross out some articles just based on the headline. If the headline doesn't interest you, there's no need to even bother reading the first three paragraphs. Notice what we're doing. We're filtering the newspaper, trying to figure out what is the most relevant information that interests us the most. When you have time to read the full articles, go back and read them. But start with the simple preview. Reading the first three paragraphs of each article. When deciding to read articles later, be sure to be ruthless with their time. You only have 24 hours in a day and not everything is worth your time. Be realistic about what you save for later. You may want to dedicate a part of your day for reading these full articles. So you're reading list doesn't pile up and overwhelm you. The most important thing to remember from this lesson is that news articles are structured a little differently from other types of informational material. The information is prioritized in a structure similar to an upside down triangle or a pyramid. Op-ed or opinion pieces that are also in the newspaper have a different structure. Op-ed articles do not have an upside down triangle structure. They're structured with introductions and conclusions. And also note that some news articles may have more meat to them. For example, the Wall Street Journal, a daily newspaper, is structured like an upside down triangle we discussed, while the economist, a weekly magazine, has articles that are more likely to contain introductions and conclusions. How do you tell the difference? Look at the size of the paragraphs. If most of the paragraphs are short, meaning less than three sentences, you're probably reading a news article structured and an upside down triangle. If the paragraphs are longer, meaning more than three sentences, you're likely reading an article with more meat to it. This means the article probably has an introduction and conclusion. The paragraphs probably have main ideas as their first sentences with details that follow. Being able to distinguish news from other types of information is very important. You can use your knowledge of the structure to get through the news quickly and efficiently. 22. Tips for reading magazine articles: Magazine articles can be read more effectively by utilizing the multiple reading process, which was discussed earlier in this course. To review, the multiple reading process is a three-step process that involves a preview, an overview, and a read. Let's talk about how we can apply this to a magazine article. For the first step, your preview, you would read the introduction and conclusion to the article. If your article is short, say ten paragraphs or so, you would simply read the first and last paragraph of the article. For the second step, the overview, you'd read all the headings and first sentences of paragraphs of the article. The first sentence of a paragraph is usually the topic sentence or main idea. By reading all these main points and all the headings of a strong understanding of what the article is about. And this is the very point where you need to decide whether or not the article is worth your time. Always be aware of your purpose when reading. If you just need to know the article generally, it may not be worth your time to read the entire thing. If you think the article is worth your time, you would proceed to Step number three and read the entire article. You'll be able to do so at a faster than usual speeds since you already know what it's about. The comprehension should also be stronger because you already know what to expect. And you also have a high level of retention because the multiple reading process includes three steps and this kind of repetition helps you remember material much more effectively. Now that's how you would apply the multiple reading process to a single article. But here's another way to apply it. If you had to read multiple articles or maybe the entire Magazine tried to preview and overview all the articles first. From there, decide which articles are worth reading entirely and discard the ones not worth finishing. To make yourself even more efficient, try setting a time limit. For example, when I'm reading The Economist, a weekly magazine, I set a 15-minute limit to preview and overview every article. After I do so I circle it if I plan to read it later and I cross it out if I don't need to. And of course sometimes I cross out in article after reading only the headline of the topic doesn't interest me. The 15-minute deadline is only to preview and overview the whole magazine. I'll read the most interesting articles later in the day when I have more time. But by setting a time limit, you force yourself to focus. You can set your own deadlines based on timeframes that are suitable to your own material. But I strongly suggest that you set them from material that you read on a consistent daily or weekly basis. 23. Tips for reading textbooks and technical material: In earlier lessons, we discussed the three-step multiple reading process and how it can help you read faster with stronger comprehension and retention. In this lesson, we'll discuss how to apply this process to textbook chapters and other types of technical material. But first, let's recap. The multiple reading process has three steps. Preview, overview, and read. During the preview, we just want the most general information by reading the introduction and conclusion to the material. The overview is where we look for the main points and concepts discussed. And the reading step is where we get everything else to get the maximum amount of detail from the material. Notice how we get more specific with each step in the process. And it turns out that our brain likes to process information in this manner from general to specific. It's harder if you start with details and then try to get more general information. Have you ever heard the expression when you get caught up in details, you lose sight of the big picture. This is exactly what happens if you read informational material from beginning to end. But through the multiple reading process, we go from general to specific, jumping around and selectively reading different parts at different times. So let's talk about some detailed ways you can apply this to textbook chapters and other types of technical material. In the first step, the preview, you'll want to search for an introduction and conclusion. In most textbook chapters, this can be found pretty easily. The beginning of the chapter might just say introduction, or you may see objectives. Or if you don't see a clear cut introduction, just read the first few paragraphs of the material. Depending on the length of your material, your introduction could be a paragraph or two pages of paragraphs. Either way, read something that will provide you with an introduction to the material. Now we need to search for a conclusion. Skip all the way to the end of the chapter. You may see it labeled as conclusion or summary. Or if it isn't clearly stated. Just read the last few paragraphs, were hoping for a conclusion that will nicely sum up the most important information in this chapter. However, keep in mind that you won't always find these perfect summaries. Sometimes you may come across information that just ends without a conclusion. If you notice that your material never contains a summary, then you can skip this part and just read the introductions during the previous step. But in most informational material, you're likely to find a summary at the end of the chapter. Now that we've read the introduction and summary, let's move on to the second step, the overview. Here we want to get the main points and most important concepts. Most technical information like textbooks have a structure to them. For example, your if your chapter has headings or subheadings, bold-faced words, you'll want to read those during this step. If you have any charts or diagrams, you don't need to fully understand them just yet. You'll do that in the next step. But you can read the titles of those charts and diagrams. If your material isn't structured with headings, subheadings, and bold-faced words. Simply read the first sentence of each paragraph, because the first sentence is tend to be the main ideas. You can easily get main ideas by reading all the first sentences. After we finished the first two steps, Think about what we've read. We've read the introduction and conclusion in step one. We've read the most important concepts in step two. Now we're ready to get the nitty-gritty details. On this third step, you should be able to read faster than what you would have if you just started reading from beginning to end without a preview and overview. And you'll also notice that you won't go back as much because you know what to expect from the information. Even though this material is technically, you should be able to read it faster than normal. The average person reading very technical material over long periods of time reads around a 100 to a 150 words per minute. So if you're going 200 to 250 words a minute in this kind of information, that's double the average reading speed in technical material by implementing the multiple reading process and practicing the exercises detailed in this course, you should be able to attain speeds two to five times faster than average. Now would be a good time to practice what we've been talking about. Try applying the multiple reading process to some technical information that you have. I think you'll find that this process will help you save quite a bit of time. 24. How to deal with charts and diagrams: In this movie, we're going to discuss how to deal with reading that includes charts, diagrams, formulas, or any other situations where you need to analyze something. First off, let's think about how many people approach this kind of situation. They're reading through their material and at some point they encounter text that reads something like refer to Figure 2.4. Then they continue reading the paragraph or page and eventually they'll stop to analyze Figure 2.4. Have you ever looked at the diagram and had trouble understanding it? It could be because it's very complex, but we still need to have a way of understanding the information. So it comes down to this. When should you look at the diagram at the end of the sentence or paragraph at the end of the page, when you encounter it. Here's what I suggest you do. The moment you've read the words refer to Figure 2.4, you should stop reading and refer to 2.4. Now I know that sounds obvious, but that's not what most people do. Most people are reading along in the moment it says referred to Figure 2.4, they go Yay, and they keep on reading without looking at the diagram. This is an issue. So when the text tells you to refer to a diagram or chart, look at it briefly just to get a first impression. Then read the next sentence and it might say something like Figure 2.4 shows the relationship between blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. At this point, you should stop reading and check the diagram to see if you can visually confirm this information. Once you confirm it visually, read the next sons. It might say additionally, Figure 2.4 also shows blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Again, you would stop reading after getting this tidbit of information and check the diagram to see if it's true. Notice how we're going back and forth between reading and checking the diagram. This might seem like a choppy way of reading, but it's an important way to boost your comprehension when dealing with charts and diagrams. Have you ever heard the expression? A picture is worth a thousand words. Anytime you can confirm information by seeing it visually through a diagram that helps your comprehension tremendously. You would stop referring to the diagram after the text stops referring to it. This is a great way to enhance your comprehension when dealing with charts and diagrams. 25. Tips for reading on tablets: Most of the techniques we described in this course can be applied to reading on a tablet. But there are some situations where you need to make adjustments for touch screens, like the iPad or the Kindle. Earlier in this course, we talked about how using your hand as a guide can help you concentrate better and thus improve your reading speed. On a tablet, this obviously is problematic. So instead of using your hand as a pacer, you can try using the opposite end of a pen to guide dries. Just move the pen smoothly and lightly across the screen so you don't scratch the surface. This can be a useful alternative, but what if you don't have a pen or what if it just isn't practical for you to use a patent. You can also use a speed reading technique that involves the use of fixation points. Here's how the technique works. You pick two or three fixation points on the line and focus your eyes on these points to read groups of words at a time. For example, if your lines are somewhat narrow, let's say you have somewhere between seven to ten words per line. You would make to fixation points. One at the first half of the line and one on the second half of the line. The first fixation point should be about three or four words from the left. And your second fixation point should be three or four words from the right end of the line. Your eyes fixate on these imaginary points bouncing from 1 to the next, grabbing groups of words along the way. If your lines are longer, say ten or more words per line, you might want to consider three fixation points, one at the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end. When you're reading this way with fixation points, you're training your eyes to read groups of words and you can speed up your reading without having to use your hand as a guide. This technique is especially useful for tablets like the iPad and kindled. If you have one, try it out for yourself and see how it works. 26. Next steps: So where do we go from here? First off, congratulations on finishing the course. A lot of people start things but never finish them. So if you've made it to this point, you've made it a lot further than most people would. The most important thing you can do from here is implement the reading techniques we discussed. If you're trying to reach an optimal reading speed, practice a speed reading drills we've covered to improve your reading rate over time. One of the most important concepts we've covered in this course was the multiple reading process. It's a three-step process that included a preview, an overview, and a read of the material. Multiple reading process ties together those three areas of reading that we all find important. Our speed or comprehension and our retention. Make sure you're applying this technique to get through your information more effectively. I want to thank you for taking part in this course. I really hope it helps you get through all the material you've been wanting to read. Thanks again and happy reading.