Myths About Reading Quickly

I first learned reading fast about five years ago for the purpose of training it to a young, eager group of sixth graders in a summer school study skills training course. I noticed at once upon arriving that I would have to find brand new ways of motivating them, so I asked them what types of stuff they might be interested in learning. The overwhelming topic of choice was reading quickly, so I read some books on the topic, took a weekend long class, and at some point in the near future increased my reading speed to around 2,000 wpm (words per minute) on an effective piece of content. I taught what I had learned to my children, and practically all of them saw a few substantial enhancement in their reading skills, both speed and comprehension. Over the training course of the next two years, I wrote numerous articles on the matter that possibly transformed itself into my page.

Doing more and more studies on this subject, although, I came upon, of all stuff, a skeptics website saying that speed reading was a waste of time.

I don't think it ought to come as any surprise that I am an ardent supporter of learning ways to read more quickly, but after reading what this page, and many other sites like it, had to say on the topic, I started to see where they were coming from.

You see, reading fast remains a fairly brand new concept. The first person to use the word was Evelyn Woods in the 1960s, an Australian educator who identified numerous bad reading habits and at some time in the future started training correspondence courses and holding seminars where she taught her approaches, most of which are still well accepted and taught today.

In the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, Howard Stephen Berg is the individual listed as the fastest reader in the world, where he claimed to be allowed to read over 80 pages of text in one minute, a speed reading abilities of about twenty five thousand words per minute. Now, I started to completely understand the skeptics.

Once you begin to look in to the record, you will see that the officials at Guinness, at the time, weren't popular for verifying the records they posted, and this was, in reality, not a record that they checked. They took Berg at his word, and it seems that he altogether invented the number. When asked to verify his claims, he's hit or miss. There are a number of television computer programs that he has appeared on where he demonstrates near perfect recall and amazing reading, but then there are also times, for instance, on his own product's informercials, where he reads 17 pages in twenty-four seconds, that could be only marginally better than fifty percent of his imply of 80 pages in a minute.

In the end, the missed chances for Berg started adding up, and in 1998, he had a lawsuit filed against him for deceptive advertising.