I first learned speed reading about five years ago for the purpose of educating it to a young, eager group of sixth graders in a summer school study skills course. I noticed immediately upon arriving that I could have to find fresh ways of motivating them, so I asked them what types of stuff they may be interested in learning. The overwhelming topic of choice was reading fast, so I read a couple of books on the matter, took a weekend long training, and possibly greater my reading speed to around 2,000 wpm (words per minute) on a great piece of content. I taught what I had learned to my children, and nearly all of them saw one or more major enhancement in their reading abilities, both speed and understanding. Over the class of the next two years, I wrote a number of articles on the subject that at some time transformed itself into my website.
Doing more and more study on this subject, however, I discovered, of all things, a skeptics page saying that speedreading was a farce.
I do not think it must come as any surprise that I am an ardent supporter of learning techniques to read more quickly, but after reading what this site, and many other sites similar to it, had to say on the matter, I started to see where they were coming from.
You see, speedreading is a fairly new concept. The first individual to use the phrase was Evelyn Woods in the ninteen sixties, an Australian teacher who identified a number of bad reading habitual behaviors and at some time started teaching correspondence courses and holding seminars where she taught her strategies, most of which are still well accepted and taught today.
In the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, Howard Stephen Berg is the individual listed as the fastest reader in the world, where he claimed to be able to read over 80 pages of content in one minute, a reading speed of about 25,000 wpm. Once you get to this point, I started to understand the skeptics.
Once you begin to look in to the record, you will see that the officials at Guinness, at the time, weren't famous for verifying the records they posted, and this was, in reality, not a record that they checked. They took Berg at his word, and it seems that he altogether invented the number. When asked to verify his claims, he's hit or miss. There are a lot of television computer applications that he has appeared on where he demonstrates near perfect recall and amazing reading, but then there are also times, for example, on his own product's informercials, where he reads 17 pages in twenty-four seconds, that may be just slightly all together better than 50% of his claim of eighty pages in a minute.
In the end, the missed chances for Berg started adding up, and in 1998, he had a lawsuit filed against him for deceptive advertising.
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Today's reading fast champion, Anne Jones, was proven and verified as having read forty seven hundred wpm (words per minute) with a 67% understanding rate. Berg and various other analogous speedreading gurus who claim to read at twice that level aren't able to obtain even this low a level of comprehension, and in item of evidence, are just able to locate the barebones outline or the issue matter of what they read.
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