Lesson 10: Post-Reading

NOTE: If you are serious about increasing your reading speed, we highly recommend you check out this popular speed reading software

Speed-reading isn’t just about quickly getting through a bunch of words. It’s also understanding what has been processed, and that’s why at times, you may need to post-read. Post-reading is re-reading the important areas of some material. Since these areas have already read, finding them and re-reading them is a breeze.

Post-reading used in conjunction with speed-reading also increases retention. Just think back when you did things the old fashioned way. Remember when you read an entire chapter on the physics of exploding stars and wondered why you couldn’t recall much of anything? Well now you know the reason why. When you read material the old fashioned way, you filled your head with a bunch of unnecessary information (refer to Lesson 4) which served little purpose other than to distract you. Now you know how to skim and scan your way through material and locate the pertinent stuff only. Post-reading is just a way to reinforce what you’ve learned.

Effectively post-read by summarizing or even writing a concise outline of what you’ve read.

Exercise 10

Read the following and then post-read to answer the passage’s questions correctly. Don’t forget to skim and scan!

If you’re reading this, chances are you take literacy for granted. It comes so naturally for the majority of us, we can’t imagine what life is like for people who can not read. If you will for a moment, just try to imagine the life of the illiterate individual. This individual can not pass the written part of a driver’s test. He can not properly manage a bank account nor can he read the contents of his own utility bills.

He must depend on the graciousness of other people to read things aloud to him, as if he were still a child. Either that or he must devise creative ways to hide his illiteracy from everyone he meets. That’s not an easy task since every part of our lives is inundated with words written by people who expect us to comprehend them. Even still, our schools fail to reinforce the very basics. They’re too busy focusing on reading wars instead of focusing on our nation’s students.

While the phonics vs. whole language debate is important, our students are lost and forgotten within the argument and they’re reduced to a group of lab rats – exploited to prove one method is better than the other. How does this solve our nation’s illiteracy problem? Plainly put, it doesn’t. And over 90 million illiterate US adults prove it.

That’s why we take great pride in offering “Randy’s Reading Program” as a free solution. Randy’s Reading Program is a full, free literacy course for grades K – 3 that features professional graphics, voiceovers, hands-off video tutorials, and a rich vocabulary full of both short and long vowels, blends, ends, silent letters, multi-syllable words, unique spelling patterns and more.

1. What do we take literacy for?
2. What are children reduced to within the phonics vs. whole language debate?
3. What must the illiterate individual depend on?
4. What is the name of the software this passage is promoting?
5. What is every part of our lives inundated with?
6. What kind of syllable words are available in the software?
7. How many illiterate adults are in the U.S.?