Waiting for school to start? Have you been practicing reading in the meantime? Here's our most honest and effective "cheat" to help you out.
We were procrastinators, too. Reading fast will save you hours of eye strain and days of lamenting the length of every book you read. Plus, reading makes you look smart!
Kris Madden is the guy we all wish we met the first day of school. The key to speed reading is how you process the words on a page. Most of us read like we did when we were a child. Kris trains us in how to consolidate this process.
Perfect your technique and you can reach speeds of up to 600 words per minute! That means you can read a book in hours, NOT days or weeks!
SpeedReading.com has a great summary on the science behind speeding up:
"In 1879 French ophthalmologist, Professor Emil Javal, found that the human eye can read several letters and words per glance within a line of text. His studies showed that reading is not done by continuous movement of the eyes across the line of text. He found that the actual reading is done when the eyes are still - the fixation phase. The actual jumping movement of the eye is not used for reading.
In 1885 a researcher called J M Cattel found that proficient readers actually read printed material in units or chunks - whole words or phrases at a time. The following extract of text quoted from popular viral email provides some evidence of this activity. The brain examines an entire word at one time in order to find the correct label according to the context and shape of the word. Not all information is equally important in the printed word. Try reading it now.
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid... Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can... The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid...it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae."