Remember Everything You Read: The Evelyn Wood 7-Day Speed Reading \& Learning Program pdfdrive com

Use the underlining hand motion.
The underlining hand motion
involves just what its name implies: You move your hand from left to
right across the page under the line of type you’re reading, as though
you were drawing a line underneath the words.
The purpose of this technique is threefold:
First, the motion helps you coordinate your eye movements with your
hands at a predetermined pace as you read. This skill becomes
increasingly important later as you learn other, more complex hand
motions.
Second, the steady underlining motion helps keep your eyes from
stopping on single words or terms in the text.
Third, the motion keeps you moving forward in the text and
minimizes or eliminates regression.
The explanation below assumes a right-handed reader, who will
typically use his right hand to execute the movements. Left-handers
should follow the same procedures with their left hands.
• Place your right hand palm-down on the page, with the thumb against
or folded under the palm.
• Relax your fingers and spread your hand out fairly flat on the page.
• Move the tips of your fingers along smoothly across the page, just
under the line you’re reading.
• At the end of the line, lift your fingers about a quarter-inch to a half-
inch above the page, and then bring your hand back diagonally down
to the beginning of the next line. 
Don’t skip any lines.
• Repeat this procedure down the page.

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Don’t regress as you read.
Assuming an active approach toward
reading and using the underlining hand motions will minimize a
tendency to read back over material you’ve already covered. Sometimes
you’ll feel you’ve missed something, and the temptation to reread a
passage will become almost overwhelming. Resist it!
Believe me, there will be plenty of opportunity to go back over a
passage at the end of a study or reading session if you feel you have to.
Almost always, however, you’ll find yourself picking up material later in
the text that you think you’ve missed. Or you may find that the material
wasn’t that important after all.
Most people read as slowly as they do because they allow themselves
the luxury of a wandering mind or an undisciplined, regressing approach
to reading. This leads to the habit of rereading and to very low reading
speeds. But if students don’t allow themselves this luxury, they can break
the bad habit—and their reading speeds will begin to soar.
Also, a pervasive fear that they’re going to miss something essential
grips most readers. As a result, they read, and reread, and 
re
reread in an
effort to pick up everything.
Unfortunately, this approach actually tends to reduce comprehension
and understanding, rather than improve them. Most studies confirm that
moving along swiftly and systematically, with little or no regression,
enhances comprehension. Nothing that’s important will be missed with
this approach, and steady reading makes it easier to understand the flow
and continuity of the text. But to believe this fact, it’s necessary to put
aside fear and venture forth into the untested waters of faster, more
efficient reading.
Fear is a theme that will emerge again and again in these pages. For
example, when readers begin to try their wings beyond the 900-word-
per-minute barrier with visual-vertical techniques, they typically become
anxious. They say to themselves, “How can I possibly read this way? I
won’t retain or understand a thing!”
If this sounds like you, don’t worry. With practice, you’ll learn there’s
no reason for fear, other than the fact that you’re delving into the
unknown. When you become more familiar and comfortable with the
new techniques, the fear will disappear.
The same is true of regressive reading. You may hold onto your safety
net—rereading—out of concern that you’ll miss something important.

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But if you throw that net away, you’ll find your comprehension actually
increases, and your speed increases dramatically, too.
To illustrate what I mean, let’s try another reading test. You’ve been
using basic hand motions and some of the other tools I described in
chapter one
. Now—in perhaps the only major exception I’ll ever make to
my no-regression admonitions—I want you to go back to 
this page
and
reread the list of techniques for efficient subvocal linear reading. In