Just think about the average limited-time sales literature in your mail – or that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity if you act within the next five minutes. If you’ve ever wondered why or how others seem to get a hold of things before you’ve even heard of them, chances are, speed-reading played a significant role. (Well, that and maybe a fast car.) So what are you waiting for? Let’s speed-read our way into those same opportunities too!

Speed-Reading Defined

On the face of it, speed-reading is simply reading fast. But there’s little value in reading fast if you don’t comprehend what you’re reading. The biggest myth surrounding speed-reading is the suspicion that the activity leaves no room for understanding. The reality tells a different story (pardon the pun). One curious aspect of speed-reading is its ability to actually increase comprehension, and the reason is quite logical: Speed-reading appeals to our short-term memory and builds upon what we already know.
According to psychologists, the short-term memory is limited to five to seven facts at a time. The quicker those facts enter the brain, the better chance they have of being processed. That’s why slow readers have a hard time recalling what they’ve just read. Slow readers are so busy processing unnecessary information in conjunction with the material that they’re reading, almost all of it gets lost!

Have you ever been introduced to someone only to be interrupted with more introductions, an evening’s announcement, a couple quietly arguing just a few feet away, and the aroma of the night’s dinner? That’s how it is for slow readers. Slow readers absorb way more information than what’s necessary, and they consequently lose what they’ve just learned in the process.

If that sounds complicated, don’t worry. We explain it all in this website. For now, you just need to acknowledge that speed-reading is much more than simply reading fast. It is in fact, a process that (1) absorbs a lot of pertinent information at once, (2) assimilates that information into short-term memory quicker than slow reading, and (3) enables the brain to comprehend short-term memory facts into something that we’d actually like to know.

Oh, there’s one more definition of speed-reading, and that is it’s pretty much everything your teachers and parents taught you not to do. Throughout this guide, you’re going to learn some techniques that might sound bizarre or contradictory to what traditional education suggests. Sorry about that. We don’t mean to turn you into a rebel, we just want you to read faster. So with your permission, we can continue. Class is about to commence!

Since this is a website about speed and we want to ensure you make some real, measurable progress, grab a stopwatch for the exercises we have in store. By the time you finish this guide, you will have cut your current reading rate by a third or more!