SPEED READING
A particularly important skill to develop if reading for a degree in an arts or humanities subject, speed reading allows you to make wide-ranging reference to a substantial body of work in the course of your essays without requiring you to familiarise yourself with every last dot and comma. Once you have speed-read your way through a considerable amount of material it’s easier to select the most important texts and concentrate on those while making occasional reference to other works from which you have extracted the (comparatively limited) relevant content.
The purpose of speed reading is to help people read and comprehend easier and quicker. It is vital to have a competing reading speed if you want to absorb a great amount of information in less time. If you are reading a lot of books, studying a lot or moving in a hard professional battlefield then you certainly suffer from what the experts call “Information Overload”. Speed reading is here to help you survive.
First you need to know the information you want to absorb. This is really important. The idea is to know what you want from what you read.
Next, you must take some time to observe your eye muscles. Watch how your muscles react when you read this text.
Now, if you want to double your reading speed you must double the number of words in your block of texts. You must also minimize the number of times you go back to previous blocks. Finally you must reduce the time you spend reading each block of text. Get details here.
A couple of key things to remember…
Perhaps as important as speed reading is knowing where and what to speed read and what to spend more time on. As a rule, primary texts require more thought and more detailed reading, whereas much critical and secondary material is, by its nature, concerned with too many themes to be entirely relevant for your purposes. I have made some research before, you can check it my admissions essay review to find out more detailed information. Thus an English student might read Robinson Crusoe in its entirety, but selectively speed read several compendia of critical essays about it. Likewise, a classicist might invest considerable time in a primary source text, like Cicero’s De re publica, but read only selectively from those critics and ancient historians who have previously assessed it.
Fundamental to effective speed reading is the ability to single out and record useful material. A four hundred page book may yield only one or two quotations worth including in a particular essay, and the trick is to find these and extract them without necessarily reading the whole work. While to do so might provide interesting background information, the student experience is one of perpetual time pressure, and it is better to show a breadth of reading than a detailed knowledge of a single, largely irrelevant work.
Some form of key is also useful in speed reading lots of material in a short while. By ‘key’, I mean an article or similar source, with clear relevance to your line of inquiry, which contains detailed references to other works – including page references – and can therefore be used as a guide in showing you where to look next or how to draw links between different sources. Clearly, it is important not to duplicate the work of a ‘key’ article like this, but having several such to direct your research and give you an idea which texts to concentrate on (the ones most often mentioned!) is no bad thing.
This simple things need a little practice and you’ll be amazed with the results. What you don’t get by using this method is the confidence gained from a professional speed reading course. You may start with some free speed reading mini course and learn a few more tips and tricks about your reading speed.
Speed reading is one of those skills which, once mastered, allows you to get far more done in a given space of time than ever before. It requires practice and an environment of pressure. Particularly for arts and humanities students, however, it is well worth the investment.