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

Principle 2:
Accept visual, as opposed to auditory, reassurance as you
read.
As you already know, most people read in a linear subvocal fashion,
moving through a book line by line and either actually or in their minds
sounding out the words. Yet the fastest and most effective readers rely
on their vision as their eyes move in a predominantly vertical direction
down the page.
To this end, you must be prepared to 
believe your eyes alone
when you
read. Don’t feel you have to test or hear the sound of words or phrases
before you can accept them.
An analogy I like involves the way most people look at a painting, a
photograph, a clock, a beautiful scene in the country or a human being.
When you see a person you know, you don’t have to say to yourself,
“That’s Joe.” Instead, you see Joe and you immediately accept the
validity of what your eyes have conveyed to you.
It’s much the same with visual reading. You must learn to trust your
eyes, even though you’ve been conditioned for years to check or test the
words you see by sounding them out in some way in your head.
To apply this principle, I want you to spend about two to four seconds
per page just looking at each of the next six pages. As you look, say out
loud key words that you see, and ask yourself, again, out loud, some
question about those words. It doesn’t really matter what words you
choose or what questions you ask. The point here is to keep your voice
“busy”, to remove it from the reading process. But as you talk out loud,
don’t allow your eye movement to slow down. Continue to move
through each page at the two-to four-second pace.
Now, begin this exercise. When you’ve finished glancing at the

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following six pages, return to this point in the text.
We encourage the “talk-out-loud” technique to help readers become
more active in learning. When you begin to engage aggressively with
words and phrases, you are more likely to establish specific objectives in
your reading, generate more thoughts and move through the material
more swiftly and efficiently.
Also, if your voice is engaged during reading, you can’t use it, either
actually or in your mind, to sound out the words you’re reading. Note
that it’s important to distinguish this talk-out-loud technique from
ordinary subvocal reading. In the former, stating occasional key words
and asking periodic questions will block most of your ability to sound
out the words in the text. In the latter, the tendency is to sound out most
or all of the words in the text.
Let’s assume you’ve followed my instructions and talked while
allowing your eyes to take in the printed matter at two to four seconds a
page. In that case, you’ll find that most of what you’ve assimilated has
been through your visual rather than your auditory faculties.
Obviously, you can’t use this talk-out-loud technique in many settings
because if you try saying key words out loud, you’ll disturb everyone
within earshot. But you can say key words silently as you read and thus
help to short-circuit your need for auditory reassurance about most of
what you see.
The more practice you get with this technique, the more confident
you’ll become in accepting at face value the visual appearance of the
words on the page, without any further checking or testing. Then, your
speed and efficiency will leap forward significantly.