Customer Reviews

10 Days to Faster Reading

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I just finished this book and it was fantastic help to my reading speed. I am a physician who always has a stack of reading, and this book deals not only with reading the stack faster, but also managing the stack.

The book has two main advantages. First, is that it is concise enough to manage and significantly improve in 10 days. Second, it has great examples to help you improve. Its hands-on approach allows you to improve quickly.

I have read the other reviews about concerns with comprehension, and I have improved with my comprehension. I tend to pay more attenition to the parts of a reading that are important.

My only regret is that I did not find this book while I was in school. This is a fantastic resource for students. It will not only improve your reading, but do it very quickly with less work. I have read other resources, including Stephen Berg's, and find they have approaches that you cannot learn quickly or easily as this method.

I am allergic to books that make big claims, and the title of this book did not look so promising. It was recommended by Julie Morgenstern in her book "Time Management From the Inside Out", and although I was suspicious, I did buy this book mainly because it was not too expensive.

Now, having worked through this book, I must confess: the book is worth every penny! This is simply a wonderful book that makes you read really a lot faster in only minutes a day. The title tells the truth! Marks-Beale gives great tips (most of which I had not found in other speed-reading books) and the exercises are great. I find myself browsing through this book over and over again.

One of the charms of the book is that Marks-Beale does not - unlike some other books - give much detail about why we read slowly and how speed-reading works. No, instead she simply starts immediately with the drills and the tips that, with some effort, give results in a matter of days or less. Not so much theory, but practice!

This is a book that I warmly recommend to PhD-students and colleague-professors at my faculty (Theology). And since (as a philosopher of religion) I have to read lots and lots simply to keep up with the literature, I constantly practice the things I learnt from this book.

Highly recommended!!

When I first bought this book I wasn't expecting much. It seemed unreasonable that reading speed could be increased greatly in a short period of time. I bought it anyway, however, in hopes that it might have valid suggestions to improve reading speed that I could develop over time.
It was a tremedous surprise when I more than TRIPLED my reading speed in just four days! When I began I was a slow to average reader (200 WPM). After four days I was able to read at nearly 650 WPM. However, comprehension is a different story. When I read quickly I find it hard to retain information. The book assures me that with practice I will begin to retain more of what I read. I am finding that this is true.
In conclusion, you should be able to learn how to read much faster (not necessarily triple your speed though) in just 10 days. But after learning how to read quickly, it will take a great deal of practice to gain the comprehension you had before.

I had the opportunity to read "10 Days to Faster Reading," by Abby Marks-Beale. I found it an excellent book, the main focus being on how to read faster, but she also touches on how to more efficiently and effectively manage other areas of your professional and personal life.

The book is very well organized and is very encouraging and upbeat. She constantly reminds one that because they are currently a slow reader, they do not have to remain that way. There are chapters on the key issues such as speed, concentration, previewing, comprehension, technical reading and studying. There are also important sub points on things like note taking, key words and phrases, newspaper and E-Mail reading. There are good summary tables (pgs 64, 76 & 118 for example) as well as tests for speed and comprehension to give you feedback on your progress.

The author also uses her experience as an "excutive coach," to help people use their time better; to determine what they should and should NOT be reading or doing, how to manage their day for better productivity, as well as how to make more time in your personal life. Even if one is not interested in improving their reading speed, I would recommend reading this section of the book.

Overall, I found this an excellent book, would recommend it not only for people who want to improve their reading speed, but also for those who would like to get a better handle on their professional and personal life.

I worked through the 10-day program illustrated in the book. The result is amazing! With continuous practice after the program, both my reading speed and comprehension improved dramatically. The author offered many different ways to develop skills to achieve two major goals: faster reading and better comprehension. I've tried all the methods and found the ones that best fit my own needs. I am sure for those who need to read a lot everyday (especially non-fiction material) will be treasured by this simple self-training guidebook.

I have read many books on speed reading and tried various techniques. I did improve my speed from 150 wpm to around 240 wpm but no more.

The approach of this book is very practical and to the point. I improved from 240 wpm to 400 wpm retaining 70% comprehension and about 600 wpm with 20% comprehension. I can see the comprehension is slowly improving. I have started reading books that I always wanted to but was too slow/lazy to read.

You should read the book slowly to understand till chapter 4 where most of the techniques are explained. The rest of the book can be read faster using the same techniques that you learnt.

Some of the techniques are
- Read group of words ignoring a, an, the, this, as
- Read thought groups
- Read only important words in a sentence and you can still understand pretty well
- Try to read vertically rather than horizontally
- Make 2-3 stops per line and gradually reduce the number of stops
- Start reading from 2nd word from left margin and read till 2 words before the right margin. You will still see the remaining words

The best of all are called right and left pull, where you place your finger (pacer) besides left or right margin and slide your finger down one line at a time. For me, this was the real golden tip.

This book goes with very high recommendations, you will get much more than your money is worth. It actually gives results in 10 days if followed properly. The results are not dramatic but significant. I am pleased that bought this book.

Ten days ago I started following the day by day lesson plan of a little book called 10 Days to Faster Reading, by Abby Marks-Beale and the Princeton Language Institute. The original post can be found here. The purpose of the book is pretty well summed up in the title. Yesterday, I finished the program.

So, William, are you a faster reader now than you were before you started? The short answer is yes; significantly. The long answer is a bit more complicated.

The Book

I'm generally not a fan of books that make huge promises and claims in the title (i.e., Your Best Life Now). I always expect them to read like an inaudible infomercial. "In only fifteen-minutes a day, you could be on your way to so much money you'll want to puke!" The cover of our current book, while modest in its design (purple, white and black), reads in a manner that's difficult not to hear in the voice from the guy on the Oxy Clean commercials. If you can't tell, self-help type books don't generally sit well with me. However, despite my judging this book by its cover, it proved itself in its pages.

The book stays largely academic; something I appreciate. Where many books in its genre sound something like a hokey life coach speaking, this one sounds more like a patient, caring school teacher. The book is divided evenly into ten chapters. The chapters generally focus on breaking old habits and forming new ones. Each chapter includes a benchmark to test your speed and comprehension. Each day introduces you to some new techniques to help build speed and comprehension and encourages you to practice those techniques, then of course to try the techniques you're comfortable with on the next benchmark.

The beginning of the book focuses mostly on the bad habits we form when we first learn to read. Marks-Beale gives some helpful advice for breaking those habits; advice which I will attest is surprisingly effective. Things such as not reading to yourself out loud or in your head; that one I found especially effective. As she presents some helpful hints for breaking those habits, she also offers some useful techniques to replace those habits. Pacers, key-wording, reading between the lines, are among them.

Toward the end of the book, she starts to move away a bit from the academic topic and more into, what feels sometimes, like out of place life advice. For example, how to prepare for a board meeting you weren't ready for or how to determine what emails you should and shouldn't read. Per Ms. Marks-Beale's advice, I skipped these sections altogether.

My Experience

On day one, I was reading at 185 words per minute, at 70% comprehension (technically a slow reader). Newly aware of my bad habits and actively trying to implement good habits, by day two, I was up to 220 words per minute with 90% comprehension (just barely making the cut as an "average" reader.) Clearly by the second day I was seeing results. Throughout the program, I fluctuated with my speed and comprehension because of experimenting with different techniques, but finally I ended at 345 words per minute with 70% comprehension (finally a "good" reader). At nearly twice my original reading speed, I'd say that the program was a wild success.

Each chapter Marks-Beale shares a new "pacer" method to help speed up your reading. Of the many offered, I felt the most comfortable using the white card method. The idea is to use an index card to keep track of where you're reading. The only difference here is instead of placing it, in the traditional way, under the words your reading, she suggests placing it above the words your reading. This helped stop me from rereading things I'd already read. It also helped stop me from day dreaming.

Another technique she suggested was to read between the lines. As ridiculous as it sounds, it ends up working shockingly well. Much of the idea of speed reading comes from the thought that we can read word chucks, not just words. Every time our eyes stop, our mind picks up information. The more information you can pick up on one stop, the faster you can read; it's reading with your peripheral vision. Reading between the lines is literally just that. Instead of placing your eyes directly on the words you're reading, look right above them at the white space. This helped me to stop focusing on specific words and pick up more information in one glance.

My eye span I think is my biggest problem. I don't confidently pick up as much in my peripheral vision as I probably could. The solution to that? Exercise. Throughout the book, there are various eye exercises to help expand your eye span; helping you become better at picking up more information in one glance. One problem, however, was that the exercises weren't really adequate. They were often too short and once I memorized them, I wasn't really gaining much. However, this has not been a problem thanks to a great program, Ace Reader, which Marks-Beale suggests in one of the later chapters. The program is full of tests to help build speed and comprehension, but most helpful, I think, are the games to help expand your eye span. The program alone I think would be insufficient to dramatically increase reading speed. Ace Reader is available for 30 days free from their website; then $49.95 if you want to keep it.

As a whole, my reading clearly became faster in the ten day period. I definitely learned some great new techniques for reading faster, which will only open the roadway for me to continue to improve my speed and I became aware of some really bad habits that were blocking me from reading faster. I would say this book lives up to its title and anyone who will stick with this reading program will almost definitely experience an increase in speed and comprehension. You'll have to stick with it though!

Kudos Abby Marks-Beale; you've written an effective and useful book!

The first few chapters of this book are helpful for improving your reading speed. From there, it turns into a more generalised self help book, addressing issues like how to label your incoming bills to make sure that you pay them on time. Thanks, but I'd rather read David Allen's Getting Things Done if I was looking for a productivity book.

Still, I was able to use the speed reading techniques (mainly how to quickly skip through dense content while maintaining some comprehension) to skip through the last six chapters and determine that I wasn't missing anything amazing by not reading them in great depth.

I'm currently a junior in college and can honestly say that this book is awesome. One of my biggest problems was that my eyes would dance around the page (like to stuff I just read) and I would forget what I was reading.

This book teaches you awesome tips like the two hand pull, phrase reading, and other things to not only read faster but drastically help comprehension. Your comprehension might take a dip after learning the tips, but if you keep it will rebound considerably. The race car analogies get a little tiresome, but help keep an upbeat tempo. When I started, I was at about 200 wpm, now I'm at about 600.

I'm a second-year law student and I often have
overwhelming amounts of reading to do.

I was the typical word-by-word reader. Afterall, this is all I had been taught. When I realized it was taking forever to get through some of my reading assignments, I went looking for help. I stumbled across your book and it has helped me tremendously.

I would say it doubled my reading speed. This is great, considering you cannot skim material in law school - catching on to detail is what it is all about.