Eyes and mind key tools

Speed-reading can shave hours off your working week, reports JULIE MIDDLETON.

Of course you can read. That's what you're doing right now, and you probably think you do it rather well.

And you read screeds at work - reports, documents, memos, specifications, emails, posters inside the wall of the lift. Endlessly. So much for the paperless office.

But that doesn't mean you're reading work documents as effectively as you could. Look at it this way, says Wellington rapid-reading teacher Jacque Aldridge: the secondary school student reads about 250 to 300 words a minute at 60 to 90 per cent comprehension.

Many otherwise competent adults are stuck right there. After all, once you leave school, not a second thought goes towards reading technique.

A "good" reading speed, she says, is around 500 words a minute. With the right training, the elite chew through 1000 words or more, without that speed impairing their understanding.

Research backs the parallels between increased speed and greater understanding, although debate continues about the precise nature of the link. And although the first rapid-reading course was taught well before supposedly labour-saving new technology, at Syracuse University in the United States in 1925, the need for speed now seems greater than ever.

During the last three years, Aldridge has been running a continuous survey of those she teaches called People at Work. It now incorporates data from 1000 workers across New Zealand and Australia.

Sixty-six per cent say their work-related reading is increasing; one-third say they can hardly keep up.

"Ironically," says Aldridge, "most of what we read at work we read to know that we don't need it! But for about one-tenth of our reading tasks, we need to recall all of the detail."

Check your prowess. Aldridge has a free speed-reading test on her website www.realisinghumanpotential.com.

My reading of a passage on screen, which tells three stories about the trials of modern life, indicates a reading speed of 549 words a minute.

Good, then, though I committed the sin of backtracking a few times (more on that later) and torpedoed my own smug assumption that a journalist might naturally be faster.

The multi-choice comprehension test follows, the mark 70 per cent - a bit short for my liking.

Aldridge's own run through her website's test recorded 879 words a minute and more than 70 per cent understanding.

Time is big money, an equation understood by a health provider in the Waikato when it engaged Aldridge to teach rapid-reading to staff. After the course, it reported, staff were saving, on average, 30 minutes a day.

"Even the slowest person can save half an hour a day," says Aldridge, who commutes between Wellington and Sydney to teach, and includes the University of Sydney among her clients.

And her students are across the board. One in Sydney was a CEO who got one-on-one help because, says Aldridge, his poor comprehension was making him look like "a dingbat" at meetings.

Technique is the key to speed-reading, she says. Many of us are not even aware of our own ingrained reading habits, let alone which of them are letting us down.

Reading, Aldridge says, "is a combination of a physical activity and a mental activity, and a lot of people don't register how important the physical part is".

Your eyes move in a series of jumps and pauses. Faulty eye movements impair speed. So does focusing on the centre of the field of vision rather than using the peripheral field. Personality also impacts, says Aldridge: if you decide early on in a piece of reading that the content is rubbish, you will recall little of it.

Inattention also hampers: "Some people read like they're watching TV, with their minds on something else."

Word-by-word reading, whether or not words are muttered under the breath - vocalisation - makes the acquisition of meaning much harder. Physical processes are so much slower than mental ones.

"If you say each word, the message to yourself is that each word is of equal value," says Aldridge. "Commonsense tells us that this is not so."

Readers focus energy on peripheral words such as "but" or "and" rather than the most meaningful ones - nouns (naming words) and verbs (doing words).

"These are the words on which we need to focus our mental energy," she says.

A fear of misunderstanding can lead to a self-imposed, if unconscious, slowdown. Anxiety prompts rereading, or "regression" in teacher-speak.

"This," says Aldridge, "is bad."

Reading everything at the same rate is simply inefficient: some documents don't require the same attention as others.

Detail-seeking accountants, says Aldridge, are particularly prone to this, "even if it's something they could just slam over and trash".

(Of course, you would not apply rapid reading to a novel you wanted to savour.)

Practice, and some good practices, are crucial for speed-reading, says Aldridge. Clear some space on your desk for whatever you're perusing, clean paper, and a pen.

"Try to get undistracted time and consciously attend to your reading."

Think strategy: what do I need out of this? Just the bare bones? To get a sense of the arguments' flow, read just the first sentence in each paragraph, she suggests.

To grasp content, latch on to nouns and verbs, possibly underlining them. If you need a more in-depth acquaintance, "preview" the reading.

How long is the piece? How recent is it? Who is the author? What is the writing style? Sentence length, paragraphing, grammar and syntax, word length? How much do you know about the subject already?

To jog your memory, jot down chapter or section headings, says Aldridge.

Note illustrations and their titles, and use a one-word statement to describe what each is about.

Read the opening paragraph and write a sentence on the key idea. Do the same with the closing paragraph. Then read the whole piece, writing just one sentence on each section.

"Chunking" - taking in the most meaningful groups of words at once - requires readers to widen their field of vision, says Aldridge. As you read, bring the margins in 1.5cm and don't read past those points. Your peripheral vision will start working harder.

When you have the flow of a piece, read in 2.5cm-wide swathes, zigzagging down the page.

Read actively: ask yourself questions, build pictures in your mind, anticipate what the writer might say next.

Underline or highlight key words, but no more than two on each line, to a maximum of half-a-dozen on each page.

Aldridge's speed-reading courses involve a fragile machine called a reading accelerator, which limits how much of a page can be read at once, but focuses concentration.

You can make your own by folding over a piece of A4 paper.

Hold it under the line you're reading and move it down the page at a steady rate. The more you push yourself to move your eyes faster, the more you have to concentrate, which equals greater understanding and recall.

A key to improving reading is also believing in yourself, says Aldridge.

Trust your brain to have taken in the meaning and resist the urge to reread.

Timed exercises, like those given on rapid-reading courses, can help to break bad habits.

And when reading something you know you need, says Aldridge, say to yourself: "I will remember this."

And most likely, you will.

Jacque Aldridge Associates