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What Is Speed Reading?
Home » Test Preparation » Speed Reading » What Is Speed Reading?The average person reads 250 words per minute. This means that if you are an average reader, you could pick up a 100,000-word novel right now -- an average novel length of 175-200 pages -- and finish it in about seven hours. If you were able to improve your reading speed to 300 words per minute, you could read the same novel in just 5 1/2 hours. If, for example, you picked up Dorothy L. Sayers' murder mystery Strong Poison, you would hurtle through the suspenseful middle of the book, and reach the denouement a full 1 1/2 hours sooner than you would have at your old pace.
This is the appeal of speed reading. Some people read mainly for fun or to satisfy their own curiosity about the world, while others read as part of their education or vocation. But voracious novel-readers and beleaguered medical students alike can benefit from improving their reading speed. Through speed reading, the first group can enjoy more leisure reading in the same amount of time -- and the second group can read the human anatomy textbook at a record pace, and then move on to the next task.
While many historical figures have gained renown for their unusually rapid reading, the idea of speed reading as a learned ability became popular in the United States in the 1960s. At that time, President John F. Kennedy hired some experts from Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics to work with his staff members and teach them to speed read. He wanted them to know more about was going on in the world while spending less time with their noses in books and newspapers. The American public saw the genius of this efficient idea, and new speed reading programs and businesses sprang up across the nation.
Presently, the market abounds in speed reading classes, software, books, and manuals. Impartial experts agree that it is possible for the average person to improve his or her reading speed -- although the most dramatic claims of some of the speed reading programs may not come to fruition in each hopeful speed reader's experience. Some people learn to read more quickly but find that they do not understand what they have read as well as they did at a slower pace. Nevertheless, speed reading programs provide structured lessons and practice opportunities for those who wish to improve their reading speed. Hopeful speed readers may wish to begin with a well-reviewed book on speed reading, since books are normally the least expensive option. From there, readers can progress to a more expensive speed reading program or software package, if they still wish to do so.
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