IMPROVING READING

IMPROVING READING

Reading fundamentally important for efficiency. The faster you read, and the more you understand, the better. The view that comprehension suffers with speed is wrong. Learn to read faster, and you will find that understanding also improves.





READING MORE QUICKLY
Few managers know a vital personal statistic. How fast do you read now? The average is somewhere between 250 and 300 words per minute (wpm), but you can train yourself, pr be trained, to read much faster. The fast tip is only to read what you need to read. Survey the material first, eliminate the superfluous, and read only what is essential. Do not Go back over words and sentence that you have already read. Keep the eyes moving forwards between groups of words, taking in as many words as possible in each group. By following such easy tips, you can speed up by 30 per cent, saving to hours in reading a book of normal length.

SKIM-READING

Practice skim-reading from paragraph to paragraph.
Read in bursts of about 20 minute, eliminating distraction.

UNDERSTANDING FASTER

In the mistaken belief that reading faster means understanding less, people often reread passages and sentence many times. In facts, their strategy is flawed. Tests show that comprehension rises with increased speed. The trained reader not only manages double the normal speed or more, but also has a higher degree of comprehension. The same methods that raise speed also concentrate the mind more effectively on what is being read. Get into the habit of taking notes. The process of selective key points itself aids understanding.

CHOOSING A SUBJECT

You probably have plenty to read simply in the course of your job. But the job will be better done if you read much more widely. Set yourself a weekly or monthly reading plan and try to stick to it. You could set a target of at lest one good newspaper a day, one relevant magazine a week, and one serious book a month. The book need not be about business management, although excellent works on all its aspects appear every year. Every such book contains valuable lessons, information, and ideas. So do newspapers and magazines. one pizza multimillionaire in the US has the word's biggest library of self-help books. Whether or not these tomes contributed to his success, the principle is powerful. There is much to be gained from reading for self-education. But do not forget to read for relaxation, too - the more you enjoy reading, the less of a chore it becomes.