Lesson 7: Words As Images

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

Here’s a neat little exercise. Try to read the following.

“Rseaerch icntidaes taht the oerdr of the ltteers in a wrod dnsoe’t mettar. What relaly mtteras is the frist and lsat leettr in the wrod. If tehy are in the rhgit palce, you can raed the wdors. Wehn you raed, you dno’t raed evrey leettr in ecah wrod. You look at the word as a wlohe.”

If any of that made one iota of sense to you, you’ve just discovered an additional speed-reading secret. That secret is the fact that the brain doesn’t always interpret words as groups of letters. According to Nottingham University’s Graham Rawlinson, sometimes the brain interprets words as groups of symbols or even entire images. Only when it runs into an unrecognizable word does it slow down to analyze a word, as a word.

Here’s another interesting exercise. It too, shows how the brain processes words as images. Try to read the paragraph below.

Phonics teach children to read by first associating letters with specific sounds, then second, by blending those sounds together into words. When children ask what a written word represents, and we reply with, “sound it out,” we’re telling them to use phonics. Whole language teaches children to read through hearing stories and then associating words with pictures, events, or situations within those stories. Many of us who attended elementary school way back in the late 50s and early 60s learned to read this way and it worked quite well for the most part. (Remember “Spot” and “See Spot run?” That’s whole language at work!)

Even though a line is drawn through all the words, the brain can still process them because it can recognize the top shapes of their letters.

These two strange passages simply reiterate the point we made earlier: There’s no real need to read each word at a time – especially since you can (1) understand them as jumbled letters and (2) recognize half of them!

Exercise 7

We’ve covered a lot since our last WPM check, so let’s do another one really quick. Retrieve the same book that you opened in lesson one and flip to a random, full page that’s different from the one you read before. When ready, set your stopwatch to a minute and start reading.

After a minute has passed, count from where you were when the timer went off to where you began reading. The resulting WPM should be much higher than your beginning WPM. If it isn’t, think about some of the things that might have slowed you down. Did you encounter some unfamiliar terms? Did you feel inclined to read some phrases that you were already familiar with? If you experienced these issues, don’t fret. We’ll work on them in the next two lessons.

You should only be concerned if you find yourself experiencing issues that we worked on at the beginning of this website (vocalizing, regression, and fixation). If those issues still play a role in your reading strategy, return to the part of the website that deals with them and rework the exercises. Otherwise, we can press on.