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Speed Reading: A must-have skill.

If you have picked up this book, you must love reading or maybe it is the reason that you want something special to help with big problems you have to solve. Yes, Speed reading will. And you’ll be right.

What is speed reading? It does not mean that you read fast. It does means that you understand fast, too, although accomplished readers can reach at the staggering speed of more than 1000 words a minute. Speed reading is the ability to understand what an author is saying, persuading, and emphasizing even while reading at the rate of 100 pages a hour. It is undoubtedly an enviable skill that hard-pressed university students have dreamt of mastering at some point. It is not only academics who benefit. People from all walks of life – artists, musicians, sportsmen and women – find it charming and enjoyable.

But, Speed reading have pooled, disappointed, and betrayed people who want to get it. Only 1-2 percent those who try to learn how to speed read succeeds. No wonder that it is a rarified art, achievable by the chosen few. This book will not only explain why this – and why it is does not need to be this way – but also explain the science behind the skill and reveal the amazing world it opens up. Most importantly of all, it will show you how to master it.

2. CHAPTER 1 SPEED READING, THE NON-ZERO SUM GAME BETWEEN READING SPEED AND COMPREHENSION It is A COMMON SENSE THAT the increasing reading speed leads to the decreasing comprehension. The faster you read, it says so, the less you learn. But successful speed readers overcome it and reach a phenomenon called as a non-zero sum game between reading speed and comprehension – in other words, the faster they read, the more they understand. They obtain a comprehensive understanding of the content they speed read, quickly grasping writer’s core messages, freely escaping from the common belief – reading speed and comprehension are prohibiting factors to each other. This belief, misleading speed reading to people, has persisted for a long time. It will come from the existing books of speed reading where the techniques and principles explained are not easily understood by ordinary people – so strange that it is difficult to accept or agree with.

For instance, they teach that you can read double or triple times faster by moving your hands in S shaped curves or in a straight line from left to right even while not pronouncing the words. Can understand it? Well, No. They also say that the increase of reading speed leads to the temporary collapse of comprehension, but it is to recover naturally at some moment, if you repeat the practice – waving hands without making sound. No explanation is given as to why.

The biggest problem, practicing with strange ones, is that the reading speed becomes so fast that your eyes cannot fully catch the words, even when they do, you cannot fully understand the meaning of them - you find you’re just skipping or bypassing them. The partial or total lack of comprehension, therefore, is the most limiting factor of speed reading. This is why people tend to doubt that speed reading is just a zero sum game between reading speed and comprehension – in other senses, the extent of comprehension is traded for the increase of reading speed. For example, if the extent of comprehension in paper is 90 percent while reading at the rate of 200 words a minute, it falls down to 70 percent when reading speed becomes 300 words a minute, and drops even further to 50 percent while reading at the speed of 400 words a minute.

Yet in reality, the converse is true. Improved reading speed elicits more well-rounded comprehension – larger and richer scale of literacy – and it leads to even faster speed of reading. It is the non-zero sum game between reading speed and comprehension and makes speed reading different from other reading skills. At one more step, the state of non-zero sum can cause speed readers to experience a phenomenon called as the snowball of understanding. It is the snowball of understanding that the extent of comprehension is accumulating, amplifying, and multiplying while reading over time. It sounds almost magic. Does not it?

But anyone can do. If you enjoy reading and want to be successful speed reader, by the methods and principles in this book – of course, along with plentiful practice – you will be able to a) escape from the zero sum game where 98 people out of 100 who try to learn speed reading have failed; and b) reach the non-zero sum game where reading speed and comprehension complements each other – and the chosen few can succeed.

In the following chapters, I will explain how to reach the non-zero sum game of speed reading.