Speed

Reading
600 wpm is the threshold of real speed reading. That’s double the average
reading speed of college students and triple the overall adult speed.
Of every 1,000 English speaking adults, only ONE is a speed reader.

Here’s the challenge: Read 600 words in 60 seconds. When you do, you’ll be
speed reading. Simple as that. With excerpts exactly 600 words long, you’ll
have an easy way to practice, measure and achieve this goal.
In only 60 seconds a day you could double or triple your reading speed by
training yourself to see whole phrases and meaningful ideas at each glance.
There are 100 reading excerpts and each excerpt is 600 “standard” words
long. The average English word length is 4½ characters. 600 standard words
plus the 599 spaces, comes to 3299 total characters.
Therefore, every excerpt in this book ends after the first word that reaches
3299 characters (including spaces). This rather abrupt ending to the exercises
is to ensure that each excerpt is precisely 600 standard word-lengths, so that
you’ll have an easy-to-see and obvious goal to strive for.
Granted, accomplishing this goal may not be extremely easy at first. (If it IS
easy for you, then maybe you’ve wasted your money on this book.) But when
you complete an exercise in one minute, you’ll be speed reading, and you’ll
see exactly what real speed reading feels like.
You CAN do this, but of course it does take practice. It also takes a new
mental approach to reading. It takes moving away from the words and sounds,
and focusing more attention on ideas and thoughts, which we’ll get into a
little in the next section on phrase-reading.
There are two speed approaches you can take. You can either see how fast
you can read an excerpt, or see how much you can understand when you push
yourself to complete an excerpt in 60 seconds. Using either or both of these
methods will develop the habits and mindsets of faster reading.
Don’t think you can’t be the one in a thousand. Many people will not even try,
but you can learn to speed read, and these practice excerpts give you a
straight-forward way to measure and achieve this goal.
The purpose here is to give you a clear and simple target to aim for; a speed
reading bullseye. Just select an excerpt, start your timer, and go!
You can read the excerpts, in any order. You can also repeat any excerpts. It
doesn’t matter if you’ve previously read them and are familiar with the
material, because all speed practice adds to your reading habits. You want to
practice what 600 wpm feels like. You want to create the habit in your mind
of reading and understanding text at an accelerated speed.
As you speed read these short excerpts, your mind will automatically adjust
and alter the way it perceives text. It will start to discover new ways to focus
better and store and assimilate information faster.
It’s not that your mind couldn’t do this before, it was just never asked to.
 Phrase-Reading
Phrases are where the meaning is. Words are way too vague on their own.
And sentences are usually too long to read in a single glance.
But phrases, meaningful word-groups, are compact and understandable pieces
of information that can be understood as a single idea, all at once, just as if
they were one single compound word.
If this is new to you, you’re probably wondering how you can focus on
meaningful phrases — how can you know what groups of words to read
together to make up these meaningful phrases.
Well, if you haven’t read Speed Reading with the Right Brain, or Easy Speed
Reading, let me give you the short version of this technique.
Basically, you use visualizing to encourage your mind to focus on the ideas
instead of words. When you attempt to visualize the ideas you’re reading,
your subconscious mind automatically gravitates to meaningful phrases
because that’s where the ideas are.
So to see the text in meaningful phrases, try to use your imagination as much
as possible while you read, and you’ll find that your eyes will focus on the
phrases for you.
To guide you while learning to read phrases, all of the text in the practice
excerpts is phrase-highlighted. This is done by alternating each phrase
between black and gray text to assist you in focusing on the whole phrases.
There’s no difference between black phrases or gray phrases — the black and
gray text is just a method to the phrases stand out as separate entities.
Note that these word-groups are not merely randomly fixed word lengths. For
example, they’re not just a set number of every four, five or six words.
Instead, the words are grouped together into actual meaningful phrases; that is
phrases that you can quickly read and imagine as complete ideas.
This is an example of phrase-highlighted text. Each meaningful phrase is easy
to see as a separate block of text so you can quickly focus on whole ideas at a
time rather than simply reading a string of words. Practice reading this text as
fast as you can while visualizing and imagining what you read and watch as
your reading turns into a virtual movie in your head.