Clearly, the possibilities of reading and learning faster and more
efficiently are enormous. But how exactly can you—or
the student in
your home—achieve these results?
That’s what the rest of this book is about: exploring and explaining
how anyone can learn the art of mental soaring. Learning these high-
powered reading and studying techniques is somewhat analogous to
flying an airplane. At the outset, you have to become familiar with the
controls on your plane, the fundamentals of flight, and a variety of other
basic aeronautic facts and principles. Then, you’re ready to take off and
try your wings.
But in flying a necessary preliminary step is to have a flight physical
to establish the precise current status of your mental and physical
faculties. It’s similar with Mental Soaring.
You need to evaluate your
reading ability at the beginning so that you’ll have a baseline to let you
know how much and how quickly you’re improving.
You’ll recall that I asked you to begin timing your reading several
pages back. Well, now is the time to STOP.
Look at your watch and record the precise minute and second.
Now you can calculate your reading speed by following these three
steps:
Step 1:
Figure how many minutes and seconds have passed since you
first began to keep track of the time for this exercise.
Suppose, for example, that your watch indicated 10 seconds past 9:16
P.M.
when you started, and it’s now 30 seconds past 9:27
P.M.
In that case,
you’ve been reading precisely 11 minutes and 20 seconds.
Step 2:
Convert the number of minutes and seconds that you read into a
decimal figure.
To do this, just divide by 60 (the total number of seconds in one
minute) the number of extra seconds you
recorded in excess of the
whole-minute figure. Then insert the number of whole minutes before
the decimal point, and you’ve got your decimal number.
In our example, you’d divide the 20 extra seconds you recorded by the
60 seconds in a whole minute, and this would give you .33. Then, before
the decimal point, you insert the 11 whole minutes you recorded, and
that will give you 11.33 minutes that were spent reading.
Step 3:
Divide the number of minutes you read (as calculated in Step 2)
into 2,700. This figure, 2,700, is the approximate number of words that
you read between the instruction
BEGIN READING NOW
on
this page
and the
instruction
STOP
on
this page
. This calculation will provide you with the
number of words per minute at which you have been reading so far in
this book.
Now to apply this step to our illustration, divide 11.33 into 2,700, and
you’ll end up with just over 238 words per minute—a rate close to the
average 250-words-per-minute reading speed of most people, including
most junior high and high school students.
If you read faster than 250, that’s great. Or if you read at a slower
rate, that’s fine too. In any case,
whatever
your
speed is now, you can
expect to increase it by at least 50 percent almost immediately.
To accomplish this, all you have to do is apply these simple
techniques, which I’ll describe in greater detail in the next chapter of
this book:
• Be sure that you’re now reading in a comfortable environment.
You should be using or have
at hand such essentials as a
comfortable chair, a solid desk or writing surface, good lighting, and a
quiet room. Unless the atmosphere is reasonably conducive to
effective reading, your ability to concentrate and immerse yourself
thoroughly and enjoyably in the subject matter will be impaired.
• As you read, pace yourself by moving a finger across the page, line by
line.
Start from left to right on this line of print, and then return your
hand like a typewriter carriage to the left-hand margin, so that it can
move again from left to right on the next line below.
Move your
pacing hand along at a comfortable speed, but don’t feel you have to
rush. Your eyes should trail along just behind your pacing finger.
• Don’t regress as you read.
That is, don’t allow yourself to stop at any point and look back over
what you’ve already read. Instead, force yourself to move ahead, even
if you think you’ve missed something or your attention has
temporarily wandered.
• Try to take in groups of words as you read, rather than looking at each
word individually.
But do this in a comfortable way. In other words, if you feel relaxed
taking in only two or three words at a time, don’t feel compelled to try
for four or five words.
If you’re a parent, share some of these very simple, fundamental
principles with your child, and encourage him to try them as often as
possible. Chances are, he’ll experiment for a while and then threaten to
give up because “it’s too hard” or “it doesn’t feel right.” But expect such
a reaction because that’s the kind of
initial response that may be
triggered by the learning of any new skill.
In any event, don’t push him. Just suggest a few of these techniques
and continue to work on them yourself. Your pleasure, as your own
reading speed and enthusiasm increase, will be the best argument to
convince your child.
By the time you reach the end of this book—and learn and practice
other skills I’ll show you—your learning
capacity should increase
dramatically and your original reading speed should double, triple,
quadruple, or soar to even higher rates.
