The previous Speed Perception exercises involving reading three lines at a time or a page in four seconds, may be called 'skimming' - this is a superficial way of reading, more a perceptual exercise than reading for meaning. Pacing, the next reading technique to be learned, describes an unconventional way of reading a page, which can reduce the amount of work by more than half without significantly reducing the comprehension. The following Scanning technique is a two-step process that involves collecting related facts and ideas and arranging them in a meaningful sequence. This involves the skill of summarising.
A plastic ruler or strip of transparent plastic 5 cm wide, is placed vertically down the page, as shown below, to delineate the section of the page where your Pacing Technique will be used.
By fixating only the words in the pacing zone, you reduce your reading time by about one half. But you don't reduce your comprehension by one half because you are forced to think beyond the words your eyes are seeing. When your thoughts are on the same subject as the material you are reading, the addition of your personal experience to the reading increases your understanding and memory.
If you read within the pacing zone by sliding back and forth in a Z or S-type pattern to the bottom of the page, you will find that you have read about 200 words with no more than 50 or 60 fixations. All the time you are reading in this way, your eyes are seeing and picking-up the odd word from peripheral vision and you are thinking all the time and putting together ideas, because the mind abhors a vacuum.
Using a 5cm transparent plastic ruler:(see next page...)
(Text from 'Wordpower' by Edward de Bono) The first 10-15 times you use this technique, expect to be frustrated. At first you may remember only 3 or 4 words from each reading, but your objective is to go past the literal act of remembering isolated words, to collecting and relating ideas. This takes a lot of practice, so don't give up! Once you have become used to this manner of reading, you can develop the use of the technique further by letting your eyes stray beyond the boundaries of the ruler, selecting from the page the words that are most informative. As you practice in this way, try to fixate on parts of speech, i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. You will find that you start to see more and more through peripheral vision, and as a result you will find that you are concentrating more and speeding-up your thinking.
1. Place the book you intend to read in front of you and place the plastic ruler or strip as above.
2. Use your right index finger or a pen as a pacer, moving it smoothly down the centre of the page, over the transparent strip. This may be helpful until you have disciplined your eyes to 'pace the page'. You may find that moving a 3 x 5 cm card down the plastic strip will be less distracting. The reason to use either the card, a pen, or your fingers in this way is to keep your eyes moving down.
3. When you reach the bottom of the page, jot down any words you remember. If you do not remember any words at all, don't let this upset you - you will improve with practice. Eventually you will remember thoughts and groups of words. By pausing frequently to mentally summarise what you have read, you will organise your thoughts and improve retention.
To acquire the skill of rapid reading requires you to break old habits and form new ones. The most important habit to break is the habit of reading word-byword, whilst expecting complete comprehension. Many reading exercises require you to forget comprehension and concentrate all your efforts on the physical skill of speed reading.
To master the Pacing Technique you must understand the training you are going to give your mind. You are being asked to look at words so fast that you cannot possibly pronounce them, and so fast that you cannot understand them either. Every time you do the above exercises you will comprehend a few words. As you continue with these exercises, you will begin to grasp thoughts and eventually, you will read at a much higher speed. When performing this type of exercise, you should always go back and re-read the passage at a comfortable rate, i.e. at a rate at which you can obtain understanding.
Every time you do a speed-exercise and then return to what appears to be your normal speed, you will find that your normal speed has become faster.Since written English is often highly redundant, i.e. much of the material can be omitted without any loss of meaning, a large proportion of information in a text can be absorbed through peripheral vision. Words that are highly likely to occur in a given context do not have to be checked by looking directly at them
- peripheral vision can check that they are what is expected even while the eye is fixating elsewhere. The Pacing Technique helps prepare you to read in this expanded way, reading not along each line, but from side to side of the centre of the page, taking in most of a line in one glance, and also peripherally absorbing several further lines beneath it.
Making fuller use of peripheral vision, the skilled reader is able to get a better idea of the general sense of what is to follow, and this helps to speed up reading as well as to understand and integrate the material. This is why many students find that as soon as they become adept at speed reading, their comprehension actually increases. They have a broader perspective of what they are reading, and since they are reading faster, the short-term memory for what has just been read goes back several sentences further and the words currently being read are understood within a larger context.
High-speed training has two further advantages: It encourages you to see the key words in the text; and it brings the right hemisphere (which controls peripheral vision) into the reading process, increasing integration and thereby facilitating the right-brain's ability to synthesise relationships within the material.
A scan is a fixed pattern of search. Scanning is a useful preliminary action, to preview material rapidly before reading it in-depth. This gives you more of the context of what you go on to read and having viewed it once already, it will have some familiarity and retention will be improved.
1. Make a rapid scan of a light novel. Start at a rate of 15 seconds per page. Later, with practice, this time can be reduced to 12 or 10 seconds per page or even less.
2. You are scanning for significant people, events and conflicts. At the end of each chapter stop to review what you have just read. Then try and speculate about the contents of the next chapter.
3. When you have scanned several chapters, no more than five, then you will probably need to ask yourself some questions relating to missed events and information, in order to be able to follow the development of the story. Speculate on these answers, then go back and re-read these chapters normally, to see if you were correct.
4. When you have reached the end of the book in the above manner, take some time to summarise the story mentally. Form and answer any unanswered questions about the story and evaluate what you gained from this book.
By using the above exercises you will soon find that you have much greater concentration and retention. Through these procedures you will have developed a lasting and very useful skill.